President Donald Trump's pardon of former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn't merely save one man from going to federal prison. Far more importantly, the pardon demonstrated the wisdom of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan's refusal to dismiss the case against Flynn. In the end, the judge's steadfastness saved the Justice Department from itself -- or at least from its attorney general.
Flynn was one of six associates of the president who were investigated and charged with federal crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. In open court, Flynn entered a knowing, voluntary and intelligent guilty plea to a felony charge for lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. However, last May, acting on instructions from Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department did an about-face in the case, seeking to dismiss it by arguing in court that prosecutors should never have brought the case in the first place.
Enter Sullivan. He declined to dismiss the case, instead bringing in an outside adviser who argued that the Justice Department's argument smelled like pretext for seeking to dismiss the case to benefit a political ally of the president.
Sullivan's healthy skepticism of the Justice Department's arguments ensured that the branches of our government functioned as they were supposed to, and that no one branch was allowed to hide from the costs of its actions. The president and his allies have repeatedly attacked the special counsel's investigation from its earliest days. Once Flynn was charged, it was only a matter of when, not if, the president would pardon him.
Under the law, nothing could have stopped the president. The Constitution grants the president an exceptionally broad pardon power over federal offenses, with virtually no caveats.
Which made the Justice Department's decision to drop the charges so perplexing. At any point Trump could have issued a full pardon. The decision to withdraw charges can only be explained, then, as an attempt by the president and attorney general to produce the effect of a pardon (that is, vacating a criminal conviction), without incurring any of the natural political costs of granting a pardon.
Presidential acts of clemency can carry political costs: George W. Bush's commutation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison term, Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, and George H.W. Bush's pardon of Caspar Weinberger still linger. But passing the Flynn pardon to the Justice Department would have been an attempt to deputize prosecutors in carrying out a political favor.
Sullivan had to have known this. By rejecting the Justice Department's attempts to get out of the case, he was protecting the justice system as an institution, ensuring that it wasn't perverted by the Trump administration and the attorney general.
Sullivan forced the president to personally carry out his constitutional duty and not pass off his dirty work. That the decision might have been politically costly is borne out by the timing of the pardon; it cannot be an accident that the pardon came only days after the president's tacit public acknowledgment that he lost his reelection bid.
In short, the episode introduced the country to a federal judge acting as a steward of the separation of powers, ensuring that one of the political branches of government carried out its duties properly. He made the president do his job, and stopped the attorney general from trampling on career employees who were doing theirs.
Williams was a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department from 2013 to 2017.