‘They expected me to plead guilty for a crime I didn’t commit…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) KT McFarland, former deputy national security adviser, said she nearly suffered the same fate as her boss, Michael Flynn, after the FBI interviewed her in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion probe.
“They were able to take Trump tweets, excerpts from text messages, things I said,” she told an audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, according to Fox News. “And they said, ‘we think you should have remembered these things, and if you didn’t remember, we think that’s perjury.’”
McFarland said the agents waited until she was alone at home before showing up, unannounced, at her home and trying to get her to talk without so much as a lawyer present.
“[T]hey seized all of my files, my documents, text messages, cell phones from the period I was in government,” McFarland recounted last week on “Fox and Friends.”
After taking her files, they sought to coerce her to either incriminate herself or throw someone else under the bus—even though she had never met with any Russians and remembered little of what they were asking about, she said.
“They expected me to plead guilty for a crime I didn’t commit, or implicate others, like President Trump, to save my own skin,” she told the CPAC audience.
Following a two-year hiatus, in which she traveled to a remote area of the Scottish Highlands to process the ordeal, McFarland has now re-emerged with a new book discussing her experiences.
It comes a month after Flynn—who was indicted under circumstances similar to what McFarland described, accused of making false statements about his conversations with Russian envoy Sergey Kislyak—sought to withdraw his guilty plea amid a sentencing standoff with the Justice Department.
Trump has weighed in on the injustice that some of his advisors, including Flynn and Roger Stone, received from the federal investigators who later found no evidence to support claims of Russian collusion. They nonetheless have pursued heavy sentencing guidelines for those who refused to cooperate with investigators.
McFarland said that the ongoing deep-state efforts helped persuade her to re-enter the spotlight.
“You need to be in this fight,” she told CPAC. “You do not want a government who can do to you what they did to me, what they did to Trump. Do not give your country over to these people.”