Professor Turley Dunks On Obama

Earlier I appended to Obama Feeling The Heat? a short Twitter thread by Jonathan Turley--a law professor at George Washington University.  I reproduce that thread here:

President Obama is being quoted on Flynn, saying "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free." It is a curious statement.

First and foremost, Flynn was not charged with perjury... 

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Second, we now know Obama discussed charging Flynn under the Logan Act which has never been used successfully to convict anyone and is flagrantly unconstitutional.

Third, this reaffirms reports that Obama was personally invested in this effort.

Finally, there is precedent...  

There is a specific rule allowing for this motion under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a). There are specific Supreme Court cases like Rinaldi v. United States addressing the standard for such dismissals.... 

The Justice Department has dismissed cases in the past including the Stevens case. That was requested by President Obama's own Attorney General Eric Holder for the same reason: misconduct by prosecutors. It was done before the same judge, Judge Sullivan. How is that for precedent? 

Lots of conservatives are having fun with Obama's absurd and inarticulate attempt to offer an opinion on the Flynn case. I note Turley's comments because Turley is quite liberal in many areas, except that he maintains a rather touching and slightly outdated faith in the Constitution as the law of the land. He's also ordinarily quite mild in expressing his opinions, so it's notable when he titles the expanded version of his Twitter thread: President Obama Declares “There Is No Precedent That Anybody Can Find” For The Flynn Motion [He May Want To Call Eric Holder]. The whole thing savors of dunking on O.


In this expanded version Turley goes right for the jugular at the outset, mocking Obama's claim to be unable to find any precedent for "someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free":

The Obama statement is curious on various levels.  First, the exhaustive search may have been hampered by the fact that Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with a single count of false statements to a federal investigator under 18 U.S.C. 1001.

Ouch!

Turley's commentary is all very much on point, but it was his closing paragraph (an expansion of his original "Second" and "Third" points) that I particularly enjoyed:

The rare statement by President Obama is also interesting in light of the new evidence. As I discussed in a column this morning in the Hill newspaper, the new material shows that Obama was following the investigation of Flynn who he previously dismissed from a high-level position and personally intervened with President Donald Trump to seek to block his appointment as National Security Adviser. Obama reportedly discussed the use of the Logan Act against Flynn. For a person concerned with precedent, that was also a curious focus.  The Logan Act is widely viewed as unconstitutional and has never been used to successfully convicted a single person since the early days of the Republic.  Now that is dubious precedent.

It's a very, very short step from noting that Obama seemed by his actions and by his discussion of the laughable Logan Act pretext to be personally invested in thwarting Flynn's accession to the NSA post to the suggestion that Obama knew of and approved of Comey's plan of action against Flynn.