Feds seek to reinstate conviction of Flynn business partner

FALLS CHURCH, Va. – While federal prosecutors are trying to dismiss their case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, they are trying to get their conviction against his one-time business partner reinstated.

Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia filed a brief Sunday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond seeking to have the conviction against Bijan Kian reinstated.

A jury convicted Kian last year of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Turkey while he was a business partner with Flynn. But the judge later overturned the conviction, saying prosecutors presented insufficient evidence to sustain a conviction.

Flynn had been expected to be the star witness for the government at Kian’s trial, but prosecutors never called him.

In Sunday’s filing, prosecutors said the bar for overturning a jury verdict should be very high and that judges should reject the “invitation to flyspeck the jury’s verdict in hopes of a better outcome.”

The prosecutors’ filing in the Kian case comes a month after the Justice Department moved to toss out a guilty plea Flynn had entered in the District of Columbia for lying to the FBI about his conversations during the 2016 presidential transition with the then-Russian ambassador. The judge in that case has so far refused to do so.