Longtime Republican politico K.T. McFarland said in a radio interview Wednesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team pressured her for “20, 30, 40 hours of hell” to either cop a plea or implicate other Trump associates in crimes, even though she didn’t think she or they did anything wrong.
McFarland, who served a four-month stint under Trump’s short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn, was ensnared in Mueller’s dragnet after leaving the administration in May 2017.
She described the “trauma” she experienced at the hands of Mueller’s interrogators in November of 2017, during an interview on WMAL radio in Washington DC.
McFarland said that she was at a disadvantage when she was being questioned because she no longer had access to her White House files.
“I am the original girl scout,” the former deputy national security adviser explained. “I followed all the rules, I turned in all of my files and my phone logs and my test messages and emails when I left government, didn’t leak to the press.”
Unfortunately, she said, “playing by the rules” is what got her “in so much trouble.”
“When the Mueller people came knocking at my door, they started quizzing me on stuff that I didn’t have access to and didn’t remember 100 percent accurately, and it allowed them to say, ‘well you must be lying then,'” McFarland told WMAL hosts Vince Coglianese and Mary Walter.
Walter asked McFarland why she wasn’t in the same position as Flynn, who ended up pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit (after Mueller threatened to bring criminal charges against his son). She replied: “because I didn’t break.”
“They gave me the distinct impression after … 20, 30, 40 hours of hell that they wanted me to either plead guilty to a crime I didn’t feel I committed, or to talk about other people having done things that I didn’t think they had done,” she explained.
The former Trump aide told the hosts that the Mueller interrogators didn’t come right out and say they wanted her to cop a plea, but that “was the impression they conveyed.”
McFarland, a foreign policy and national security expert whose political career goes back to the 1970s, said she’d had “a really hard time of it” and almost broke herself.
“At one point, I turned to my lawyer and said, ‘just tell me what they want me to say and I’ll say it!'” she recalled.
McFarland told the hosts that she just wanted the ordeal—which cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees—to be over with.
“My husband, God bless him, said ‘you can’t do that. Even if we go bankrupt,” she continued. So McFarland decided to stand her ground.
“I finally said, no, you’re going to have to charge me with a crime,” she said. “At that point, they went away because I couldn’t give them what they needed to spin their web. And then they moved on to the porn star queen,” she added, referring to porn star Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels.
McFarland said that afterward she felt “so traumatized,” she and her husband left the country.
“We went to the remotest part of Scotland,” she said. “And I just tried to think about, ‘what is happening to my country?!'”
“This tool, which we had given the intelligence community—which is a good thing for them to have if they’re tracking down mass murderers and terrorists—they were using it for political purposes to go after political enemies,” McFarland lamented.
After her “time in the wilderness,” she said she realized that the country was going through a “revolution” that was way bigger than the anti-Trump Washington establishment.
“They’re a certain group of people who have gotten used to governing and they think it is their divine right,” she explained. “And even if the American voter votes for someone who wants to get rid of them or change their policies, they feel they have the patriotic duty to overrule election results.”
Because of these unanswerable bureaucrats, the United States is now in “a very dangerous place,” McFarland warned.
“We Americans have the constitutional right to have political revolutions at the ballot box and we go through this every four years because government by its nature, digs in, becomes status-quo,” she explained. “They want to protect their privileges and policies and so whenever somebody comes along and says, ‘lets do something differently,’ they reisist, they fight.”
She described this struggle as “a fight between the governed and the people who are doing the governing” and declared: “We the people think we should be in charge.”
McFarland said this power-hungry Washington establishment was made up of “permanent, professional politicians at the administrative state” and people in the bureaucratic state “who can’t be fired from government,” as well as “think tanks, the mainstream media.”
“They’re all part of the same group and they think they’re the ones in charge,” she said.
McFarland said her new book, Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People” describes her ordeal in greater detail. It’s set to be released on February 25.