'Historic Misuse': Former FBI intel chief slams Comey's pursuit of Flynn

The FBI's former top intelligence official says the bureau under James Comey's leadership did not have a legitimate reason to launch an investigation into Michael Flynn and may have engaged in an "historic misuse" of the nation's premier law enforcement agency.

Retired FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock told Just the News that agents had sought to close the investigation into the incoming national security advisor in January 2017 but the "Comey team" intervened via fired agent Peter Strzok to stop the closure and to pivot to an interview with Flynn.

The closing memo communicated that "they had never established any reasonable suspicion that Michael Flynn was acting on behalf of a foreign country at all, ever in the beginning. In other words they had no basis to start the investigation in the first place," Brock explained.

He described the FBI's interview of Flynn as "some type of intimidation" and he said they did not have a legal justification to question him.

"They wanted to get in front of him and see if they could elicit some type of false statement, that was their goal," Brock told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Thursday. "They had no right to get in front of him. They had no legal basis to be in the same room with him. That's the disgrace of all of this."

On Thursday, the Justice Department dramatically asked a federal judge to drop the case against Flynn, saying new evidence showed his prosecution was flawed from start to finish.

Brock, the bureau' first ever intelligence chief under former Director Robert Mueller, described the Flynn episode as very abnormal. He blamed a "cabal" of higher ups "who have firmly established their political leanings and biases in search of some way to investigate or interfere with a then-presidential candidate and then afterwards an incoming president."

Brock described a 302 interview report related to Flynn's interview as the most peculiar he had ever encountered out of the thousands he has written or reviewed.  

He said that if it is shown that the FBI interviewed Flynn for reasons pertaining to "a policy dispute" that would represent a "historic misuse of the FBI."