Retired General Michael Flynn, whose life was turned upside down by the Russia collusion investigation, told Just the News he would never have accepted his 2018 plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller had he known the full FBI evidence in his case.

“Had I seen that evidence that you have broken, no way in the world,” Flynn told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Wednesday night hours after President Donald Trump’s administration declassified the fully unredacted versions of the FBI’s 2017 handwritten and typed notes of his interview with agents during which prosecutors alleged the former three-star general lied about his contacts with a Russian diplomat.

Those documents showed there were conflicts and discrepancies between what the agents wrote in their handwritten notes and what they put in their typed interview about his recollections the day he spoke with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. 

Flynn said Wednesday he believed the discrepancies were enough to undercut the charge that he lied to the agents.

“In fact, they would have had no ground to stand on to charge me with anything, and they knew it. They knew it from the beginning,” he said.

Flynn’s defense team began to see redacted versions of the handwritten notes and the typed interview report a year after his conviction and put some of that redacted evidence into the court record. Eventually, Flynn was pardoned by Trump and the Justice Department formally withdrew his conviction.

Wednesday was the first time, however, Flynn got to see the fully declassified documents without blacked out sections.

“There is a lot of new information that I was not aware of,” he said, saying he feared the FBI’s representations to the court during his prosecution “didn't reflect hardly anything of what was actually the truth.”

Flynn said he agreed under pressure to plead guilty in December 2018 because the government was threatening to prosecute his son. “The background of the plea was because of you know the seriousness of what they were going to do going after my son for no reason at all,” he said.

Though his charges have long been dropped and he has been pardoned, Flynn said there needs to be prosecutions of those who pursued the Russian collusion investigation or other lawfare cases to politically undermine Trump.

“It's not water under the bridge. It has to be exposed,” he said. “We have to bring these people to account.”

The notes from former Special Agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka were released Wednesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force at a time when federal prosecutors are ramping up a grand jury investigation into whether the FBI's probe of Russia collusion amounted to a criminal conspiracy to falsely impugn Trump and his supporters during the 2016 election and its aftermath.

In past testimony and a book he authored, Strzok  has denied wrongdoing and defended the FBI pursuit of the Russia collusion probe codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.

The contemporaneous notes show differences between what the agents wrote down when they interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, and what was recorded in the official typed summary of the interview, known as an FD-302, that was entered into the FBI system more than 20 days later and later used to underpin his prosecution.

Flynn was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in November 2017 with one count of false statements to the FBI agents investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

According to prosecutors, Flynn “falsely stated and represented” to agents that he “did not ask the [Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak] to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States had imposed against Russia” for alleged 2016 election interference.

On December 20, 2016, the same day that Flynn had at least one call with Kislyak, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats and authorized the government to respond to Russian cyber operations. 

But Pientka's handwritten notes contain a tantalizing notation apparently attributed to Flynn in the interview about his conversation with Kislyak: "Hey, don't do anything."

Likewise, the FBI summary report stated that Flynn recalled making four or five calls the day he talked with the Russian diplomat from a Christmas vacation spot in the Dominican Republic. But Strzok's notes quoted Flynn as saying: "If so, don't remember. If so, busy place to make phone calls."

Though Flynn initially pleaded guilty to the charges, he later filed to withdraw his plea under new representation. His new lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that the FD-302, which formed the basis for the charges against her client, had been altered by Strzok, one of the agents who interviewed Flynn, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who did not attend the interview. 

In the pair’s text messages, which were publicly exposed in 2020, Strzok and Page discussed how Strzok had made significant edits to the FD-302. In fact, Strzok told Page he was “trying not to completely re-write” the summary because of its poor original state. Page also provided edits, the text messages show. 

Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, ending the prosecution. Flynn filed a civil suit in 2023 alleging malicious prosecution, claiming DOJ investigators, under what he called “virulently anti-Trump leadership” within the FBI, had targeted him because of his association with Trump's 2016 campaign, and that he was “falsely branded as a traitor,” lost business opportunities and incurred significant legal costs. 

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2024, but he filed again when Trump returned to office. In March 2025, the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi settled the suit for approximately $1.2 million, The Associated Press reported.  

Strzok and Pientka’s FD-302 file records show that Flynn said that he did not remember discussing with Kislyak the expulsion of diplomats and new sanctions. According to the agents, when asked whether he asked the Russians to refrain from escalating with their own sanctions, Flynn is said to have responded, “Not really. I don’t remember. It wasn’t, ‘Don’t do anything.’” 

But, the wording departs from how one of the agents first memorialized Flynn’s response in the interview more than 20 days earlier. According to Pientka's handwritten memo, Flynn was asked whether he had any recollection of such a conversation with Kislyak and he replied, “Not really. I don’t remember. Hey don’t do anything.” 

The agent separately records that Flynn said there was no “long drawn out” discussion “about don’t do anything.” But, the notes show that Flynn did not tell agents that he never spoke with Kislyak and never asked him to refrain from escalating with further expulsions and the sanctions, which prosecutors later accused him of lying about. 

In another instance, the agents appeared to have altered Flynn’s response to a question about the number of calls he remembered having with the Russian ambassador and others related to the diplomatic incident. In the FD-302, the agents write that “FLYNN remembered making four to five calls that day about this issue, but that the Dominican Republic was a difficult place to make a call as he kept having connectivity issues.”

However, in both memos, the agents note that Flynn did not recall making four to five calls. “I [do not] remember making 4-5 calls,” one agent wrote, using a common symbol for “do not” or “no.” “If did lousy place to call,” he added to Flynn’s response. The other agent wrote that Flynn answered “if so, don’t remember,” to a question about the number of calls. 

You can read both sets of handwritten interview notes and the FD-302, released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, below: 

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FLYNN FBI 302 - redacted and declassified by FBI 7.30.26.pdf

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Pientka interview notes - redacted and declassified by FBI 7.30.26.pdf

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Strzok interview notes - redacted and declassified by FBI 7.30.26.pdf