Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland said FBI agents working with Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe tried to set up her up in a “perjury trap.”
McFarland, who served under former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, told “Fox & Friends” on Friday her life “went to hell” at the beginning of the Russia probe because investigators were convinced she was President Trump’s link to the Russians, FoxNews.com reported
“The FBI showed up at my house unannounced. I was all by myself. They come in and I said, ‘Do I need a lawyer for anything? I have never met with any Russians. I have never dealt with any Russians,'” she told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade.
Supporters of Flynn contend he is innocent and was forced to plead guilty to perjury in the Mueller probe when his son was threatened with prosecution and ran out of money.
‘The whole time they were setting me up’
McFarland said the agents who questioned her insisted they just needed a “little bit of information” to help them with the investigation.
“So, I naively went along with it. The whole time they were setting me up for a perjury trap,” she told “Fox & Friends.” “Because Brian, they seized all of my files, my documents, text messages, cell phones from the period I was in government. … They had control of them. They wouldn’t let me have control of them.”
She said the search turned up nothing.
“They thought they could pressure me to say, ‘Well, I lied in one of my early talks with you guys when I didn’t have access to my information,'” she said.
McFarland said the agents were suspicious of a 90-minute period she spent in the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida in which she didn’t have any recorded correspondence or conversation in her phone records.
The agents suspected she got marching orders from Trump during that time.
But she explained that she was having lunch with her husband and had put her cellphone away.
“Look, they had absolutely targeted me for a perjury crime or to link Trump and until I got the best lawyer in the country to come along with me, they really thought they had me,” she said.
Flynn has moved to withdraw his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI about his communications with a former Russian ambassador. Last week, the Justice Department appointed an outside prosecutor to review Flynn’s case.
Sentencing has been indefinitely postponed.