UPDATED: Sullivan Wants To See Flynn In Jail

Sullivan Appoints Gotti Prosecutor To Argue That Flynn Should Be Jailed For Contempt (Perjury)

OK, I get this. It's possible that Sullivan did, in fact, back off from the Amicus Brief gambit, and decided on this perjury gambit instead. I had been having trouble understanding why he dismissed Powell's motion--objecting to Amicus Briefs--as "moot" if it was a simple scheduling matter. This move places Sullivan on firmer ground. If AG Barr has stymied efforts to railroad Flynn on a false "1001" charge, Flynn will find another way to jail Flynn and smear him before the public.

I warned quite a while ago that pleading guilty when you actually believe you're NOT guilty--under oath--is possible perjury and is very inadvisable. No matter what. However, the factual situation in the Flynn case isn't simple. Flynn was being told by his lawyers, basically, that he was guilty under the law as it's interpreted and that he should plead. They urged him strongly to accept the "deal." He had no access to the facts of the case--the recording of his conversation with Kislyak, and was falsely told that the agents supported the Team Mueller position. And Team Mueller was threatening to prosecute Flynn's son unless Flynn pled guilty. Pretty much overnight.

Powell is well up to arguing these facts and IMO has a good chance of winning--on appeal (I assume Flynn has no chance with Sullivan).

In the current circumstances, in which Sullivan turns a blind eye to clear government crimnality and is instead intent on jailing the victim, what Sullivan is doing seems incredibly abusive to me. It's true that you shouldn't plead guilty when you don't think you're guilty, but the real world of human beings--especially for non-lawyers in a high pressure legal environment--is a helluva lot more complicated than that. That's true for many "1001 False Statements" prosecutions--I've written about the iniquity of these prosecutions repeatedly, citing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's views. It's also true for more than a few instances of perjury.

The law is not supposed to be like a rack--on which people who haven't actually committed a real non-process crime and who were investigated on false pretenses, in order to frame them on a process crime, are broken. Nothing could be more obvious than that Sullivan has no interest in this case except to see Flynn in jail, disgraced as a liar and perjurer if he can't be convicted for a crime he didn't commit. All for purely political reasons.

Welcome to the world of Liberalism.

ADDENDUM: I believe this would be Criminal Contempt. That means that Trump could pardon Flynn for the contempt. That, perhaps, is what Sullivan is aiming for--to force Flynn to accept a pardon that will leave him forever smeared as a perjurer.

UPDATE 1: Paul Mirengoff:

Before becoming a judge, Gleeson was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. In that capacity, he worked closely with Andrew Weissman, perhaps the most hardcore Trump hater on Robert Mueller’s defunct team of Trump haters.

Sullivan plainly has it in for Michael Flynn. In addition, he wants to show William Barr who’s the boss.

UPDATE 2: Yeah, weird:

Joel B. Pollak
@joelpollak

The idea that @GenFlynn would be found in criminal contempt for a “lie” in which he a) asked the court to find him guilty and punish him, and b) allowed him to help the government in a major investigation, runs against the interests of liberty, public policy, & plain common sense

8:21 PM · May 13, 2020 

Obama Lies: Obama Pardoned General Who Pled Guilty To "Perjury"

A big Hat Tip to indispensable blogger Don Surber, who refers to this January 17, 2017, NYT story via one of his readers. I found the link:

Obama Pardons James Cartwright, General Who Lied to F.B.I. in Leak Case

This is truly stunning.

Just days before President Trump was inaugurated--at the very same time that the FBI was plotting to ambush interview Michael Flynn and frame him for a non-crime--disgraced former President Obama pardoned a general who had pled guilty to "lying to the FBI," or "perjury" as Obama calls it in his legal ignorance. The law the story is referring to, the law to which Michael Flynn initially pled guilty and to which Jame Cartwright pled guilty, is 18 USC 1001, False Statements to the United States Government.

OK, a pardon isn't the same thing as having the case dismissed for lack of evidence and for government misconduct. Nevertheless, most people, especially those with as sketchy a knowledge of legal matters as Obama, would agree that James Cartwright, perfectly fits the description in Obama's very recent words:

"was someone who [had] been charged with perjury [and] just [got] off scot-free."

 Here's how the NYT describes this episode:

President Obama on Tuesday pardoned James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program, saving him from a possible prison sentence. 

General Cartwright, who was a key member of Mr. Obama’s national security team in his first term and earned a reputation as the president’s favorite general, pleaded guilty late last year to misleading investigators looking into the leaking of classified information about cyberattacks against Iran. 

He was due to be sentenced this month. His defense team had asked for a year of probation and 600 hours of community service, but prosecutors had asked the judge overseeing his case to send him to prison for two years. 

Now, the retired general will be spared such punishment.

Will the sycophantic media hold Obama to account for that precedent--just one more of his lies?

UPDATED: Judge Sullivan's Challenge

Despite the fact that Judge Sullivan totally shot himself in the foot with his absurd speculation regarding the possibility of General Flynn being charged with treason, it does appear that Sullivan remains focused not only on the misconduct (read: possible criminal conduct) by Team Mueller and the FBI, but also on the legal insufficiency of the charge against General Flynn--False Statements to the US Government, 18 USC 1001.

In that regard, legal tweeter Techno Fog flagged this fascinating exchange--note that the "Kelner" who responds to Judge Sullivan is one of Flynn's attorneys, Michael Kelner:

Techno Fog‏ @Techno_Fog

Near adjournment, Judge Sullivan mentions that he will likely have "many, many, many more questions" - including: 1) how the gov't investigation was impeded 2) What was the material impact of the crimes /end

6:25 PM - 18 Dec 2018

The important point Sullivan has in mind comes toward the end, when he says:

"These are questions that you would prepared to answer anyway, such as, you know, how the government's investigation was impeded? What was the material impact of the criminality? Things like that."

Obviously Flynn's lawyer, Kelner, likes what he's hearing, is very much in favor of "things like that," and he says so:

UPDATED: Setting False Statement Traps Is Not Official FBI Business

As the slow motion drama of the Michael Flynn prosecution winds slowly toward sentencing, it has become increasingly clear that the conservative commentariat feels conflicted. On the one hand, they can't approve of what appear to be lies on the part of Flynn--inexplicable as this appears to have been in the circumstances (Flynn knew that the FBI had a recording of his conversation with the Russian Ambassador). On the other hand, there seems to be something distinctly fishy about the entire case against Flynn. The evidence of investigative and prosecutorial misconduct--possibly including criminal acts--has become overwhelming. Nor has Robert Mueller's reply to the Flynn response to the sentencing memorandum allayed any of those misgivings--quite the contrary, as Scott Johnson (one of the Powerline bloggers) puts it:

I find the reply memo to be a shocking document. Something does not compute.

Something is clearly wrong with it all. Whether or not Flynn lied, it all seems so unfair, including the very way in which the agents conducted the interview. Another of the Powerline bloggers, Paul Mirengoff nicely sums up what we instinctively know was going on:

There’s no mystery about what happened to Flynn. Towards the end of the Obama administration, this decorated General and top intelligence official left the government and became the leading critic of the administration’s national security policy.  

Compounding his offenses against the deep state, Flynn joined the Trump campaign team. ...  

For the deep state, this was the last straw. Once Flynn was named Trump’s national security adviser, it sought revenge. ... 

Yet, the question arises: Is there a legally principled way to address the Flynn situation, one which does justice to Flynn--despite his misconduct--but preserves the integrity of our justice system and, crucially, of our courts? I believe there is and addressed it this past Saturday. The solution should, in fact, be glaringly obvious, but has escaped notice--most likely because it requires an examination of the basic principles underlying law enforcement in our constitutional system. In our system of law the State is not authorized to simply test its citizens--citizens are entitled to be left alone unless law enforcement has some articulable reason for approaching them. Let me state this very bluntly, with application to the Flynn case, before examining it in more detail:

False Statement Traps Are Not Official FBI Business. The FBI has no authority to interview random people to see whether they will lie. They must have an articulable reason for the interview to begin with--one that flows from their official duties. All else must follow from that.