HARTMANN Stealth Fighter U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen Survives Trump Travesty Unscathed BY RAY HARTMANN
I
was wrong about U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen. On February 26, I wrote in this space that Jensen — the top law enforcement official in our region — might regret having been tapped by Attorney General William Barr for a terrible mission: going to Washington to do Donald Trump’s dirty work by springing one of the many convicted criminals in his orbit, General Michael Flynn. Noting that Jensen had established a fine reputation in the local
legal community for honesty and fairness, it seemed no good could come of such an inglorious assignment. I concluded my column with this not-at-all-prescient assertion: “Jeff Jensen has built himself a fine reputation in St. Louis. But if he fulfills the mission for which Barr has tasked him, he might find himself coming home without it.” OK, I was partly correct. Jensen’s mission was to wrong a judicial right. He was there to free a guilty man because that’s what Boss Trump demanded. But I’m not sure it hurt his reputation nearly as much as one might expect. Flynn had been one of Trump’s sleaziest enablers after the 2016 election. Right after the outgoing Obama administration belatedly slapped sanctions on Russia for meddling in our election, Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was tracked down by his Russian pal, Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, for assurance that Putin-Poodle-Elect Trump would not annoy the home office in Moscow
with such nonsense. That message was received loud and clear by Flynn, but not so much by Vice President Mike Pence, who flew into a rage after looking foolish for proclaiming there had been no talks between Flynn and Kislyak. Flynn had told him that, and in the infancy of the Trump administration, that sort of thing was still called a lie. Long story short, Flynn got visits from FBI agents wondering if he was a Russian asset (which he may well have been) and whether he was carrying out some nefarious deal between Trump and Putin to ease sanctions (which he almost certainly was). One thing led to another, and Flynn lasted just 24 days as national security adviser, slightly longer than caviar keeps in the White House fridge. One of those things was Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI. But none of that matters in 2020, because Trump has been unchained by beating the impeachment rap, so it’s jailbreak party time for the
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legions of convicts like Flynn surrounding him. Enter Jensen, with the solemn duty to “review” the FBI’s questioning of Flynn. Twenty minutes later, the answer was obvious. A perfectly innocent three-star general had been tricked into thinking he was actually a guilty man for having lied about his interaction with Kislyak, despite his own extensive background in military intelligence. Hey, it happens every day: An honest man gets confused that he’s guilty, so he tells a judge under oath that he lied to the FBI. Then, at sentencing, he tells the judge again that he’s guilty of having lied, but in so doing demonstrates that he’s telling the truth the second time about lying the first time. As all good Americans know, the tie goes to the runner. So, the man must go free. Jensen did the deed perfectly, apparently without leaving much of a public paper trail of his own. It was Barr who released a houseof-mirrors equivalent of a brief so
MAY 13-19, 2020
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