WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump par­doned for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Michael Fly­nn on Wednes­day, tak­ing direct aim in the final days of his admin­is­tra­tion at a Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion that he has long insist­ed was moti­vat­ed by polit­i­cal bias.

“It is my Great Hon­or to announce that Gen­er­al Michael T. Fly­nn has been grant­ed a Full Par­don,” Trump tweet­ed. “Con­grat­u­la­tions to @GenFlynn and his won­der­ful fam­i­ly, I know you will now have a tru­ly fan­tas­tic Thanksgiving!”

Fly­nn is the sec­ond Trump asso­ciate con­vict­ed in the Rus­sia probe to be grant­ed clemen­cy by the pres­i­dent. Trump com­mut­ed the sen­tence of long­time con­fi­dant Roger Stone just days before he was to report to prison. It is part of a broad­er effort to undo the results of an inves­ti­ga­tion that for years has shad­owed his admin­is­tra­tion and yield­ed crim­i­nal charges against a half dozen associates.

The action voids the crim­i­nal case against Fly­nn just as a fed­er­al judge was weigh­ing, skep­ti­cal­ly, whether to grant a Jus­tice Depart­ment request to dis­miss the pros­e­cu­tion despite Flynn’s own guilty plea to lying to the FBI about his Rus­sia contacts.

The move, com­ing as Trump winds down his sin­gle term, is like­ly to ener­gize sup­port­ers who have tak­en up the case as a cause cele­bre and ral­lied around the retired Army lieu­tenant gen­er­al as the vic­tim of what they assert is an unfair pros­e­cu­tion. Trump him­self has repeat­ed­ly spo­ken warm­ly about Fly­nn, even though spe­cial coun­sel Robert Mueller’s pros­e­cu­tors once praised him as a mod­el coop­er­a­tor in their probe into ties between Rus­sia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

House Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chair Jer­ry Nadler said the par­don was unde­served and unprincipled.

“The President’s enablers have con­struct­ed an elab­o­rate nar­ra­tive in which Trump and Fly­nn are vic­tims and the Con­sti­tu­tion is sub­ject to the whims of the pres­i­dent,” the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gress­man said in a state­ment. “Amer­i­cans sound­ly reject­ed this non­sense when they vot­ed out Pres­i­dent Trump. ”

The par­don is the final step in a case defined by twists and turns over the last year after the Jus­tice Depart­ment abrupt­ly move to dis­miss the case, insist­ing that Fly­nn should have nev­er been inter­viewed by the FBI in the first place, only to have U.S. Dis­trict Jus­tice Emmet Sul­li­van refuse the request and appoint a for­mer judge to argue against the fed­er­al government’s position.

In the months since, a three-judge panel’s deci­sion order­ing Sul­li­van to dis­miss the case was over­turned by the full appeals court, which sent the mat­ter back to Sul­li­van. At a hear­ing in Sep­tem­ber, Fly­nn lawyer Sid­ney Pow­ell told the judge that she had dis­cussed the Fly­nn case with Trump but also said she did not want a par­don — pre­sum­ably because she want­ed him to be vin­di­cat­ed in the courts.

Pow­ell emerged sep­a­rate­ly in recent weeks as a pub­lic face of the Trump’s efforts to over­turn the results of his elec­tion loss to Pres­i­dent-elect Joe Biden, but the Trump legal team ulti­mate­ly dis­tanced itself from her after she advanced a series of uncor­rob­o­rat­ed con­spir­a­cy claims.

The par­don spares Fly­nn the pos­si­bil­i­ty of any prison sen­tence, which Sul­li­van could poten­tial­ly have imposed had he ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to reject the Jus­tice Department’s dis­missal request. That request was made in May after a review of the case by a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor from St. Louis who had been spe­cial­ly appoint­ed by Attor­ney Gen­er­al William Barr.

Fly­nn acknowl­edged lying dur­ing the FBI inter­view by say­ing he had not dis­cussed with the then-Russ­ian ambas­sador, Sergey Kislyak, sanc­tions that had just been imposed on Rus­sia for elec­tion inter­fer­ence by the out­go­ing Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. Dur­ing that con­ver­sa­tion, Fly­nn urged Kislyak for Rus­sia to be “even-keeled” in response to the puni­tive mea­sures, and assured him “we can have a bet­ter con­ver­sa­tion” about rela­tions between the two coun­tries after Trump became president.

The con­ver­sa­tion alarmed the FBI, which at the time was inves­ti­gat­ing whether the Trump cam­paign and Rus­sia had coor­di­nat­ed to sway the election’s out­come. In addi­tion, White House offi­cials were stat­ing pub­licly that Fly­nn and Kislyak had not dis­cussed sanctions.

But last May, the Jus­tice Depart­ment abrupt­ly reversed its posi­tion in the case. It said the FBI had no basis to inter­view Fly­nn about Kislyak, then the Russ­ian ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States, and that any state­ments he may have made were not rel­e­vant to the FBI’s broad­er coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence probe. It cit­ed inter­nal FBI notes show­ing that agents had planned to close out their inves­ti­ga­tion into Fly­nn weeks earlier.

Fly­nn was oust­ed from his posi­tion in Feb­ru­ary 2017 after news broke that he had indeed dis­cussed sanc­tions with Kislyak and that for­mer Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials had warned the White House that he could be vul­ner­a­ble to blackmail.

Fly­nn, of Mid­dle­town, Rhode Island, was among the first of the president’s aides to admit guilt in Mueller’s inves­ti­ga­tion and coop­er­at­ed exten­sive­ly for months. He pro­vid­ed such exten­sive coop­er­a­tion that pros­e­cu­tors did not rec­om­mend any prison time and sug­gest­ed that they would be fine with probation.

But on the morn­ing he was to have been sen­tenced, after a stern rebuke about his behav­ior from Sul­li­van, Fly­nn asked for the hear­ing to be cut short so that he could con­tin­ue coop­er­at­ing and earn cred­it toward a more lenient sentence.

After that, though, he hired new attor­neys — includ­ing Pow­ell, a con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor and out­spo­ken crit­ic of Mueller’s inves­ti­ga­tion — who took a far more con­fronta­tion­al stance to the government.

The lawyers accused pros­e­cu­tors of with­hold­ing doc­u­ments and evi­dence they said was favor­able to the case and repeat­ed­ly not­ed that one of the two agents who inter­viewed Fly­nn was fired from the FBI for hav­ing sent deroga­to­ry text mes­sages about Trump dur­ing the 2016 campaign.