Was to get Flynn to lie, so they could prosecute him or get him fired.
[Friday-morning update]
Flynn never violated the Logan Act, but John Kerry did repeatedly. But that’s different because shut up.
[Noon update]
Something seems rotten in Flynn’s case, and maybe others, too. Meanwhile, former FBI General Counsel has flipped, and there’s a mole inside the FBI. Sounds like Durham may be closing in.
And thoughts on why Flynn was set up by Obama loyalists.
The only reason I can think of for Trump to not have issued a pardon to Flynn right after the acquittal vote in the Senate, is to allow Lt. Gen Flynn a chance to recoup his legal expenses in civil court. Either after judge Sullivan dismisses the case or should Sullivan proceed to a conviction on the guilty plea, it gets overturned on appeal. I’m assuming that acceptance of a pardon could be interpreted as an admission of guilt which would weigh heavily against Flynn in a ‘preponderance of the evidence’ case in civil court. This as opposed to an out and out dismissal in criminal court for prosecutorial misconduct. Can former members of the FBI and DoJ be sued for financial remedy due to misconduct while in office? Love to see Lt. Gen Flynn grab all the royalties generated by “A Higher Loyalty” even though it’s currently going for just $8.40 on Amazon for hardcover. Got to be selling at a loss.
“The only reason I can think of for Trump to not have issued a pardon to Flynn right after the acquittal vote in the Senate, is to allow Lt. Gen Flynn a chance to recoup his legal expenses in civil court. ”
Another reason is supplied by Mark Steyn:
“I heard Kellyanne Conway being asked this morning about whether Trump should now pardon Flynn. No. It is for the court, as an act of judicial hygiene, to accept Flynn’s withdrawal of his enforced guilty plea (made under threats by the feds to destroy the lives of various family members, too), quash the conviction as a miscarriage of justice, and invite the defense to lay before His Honor a wrongful prosecution suit.
If it requires a presidential pardon to bring garbage like this to an end, then we are all in trouble. Because if the Deep Staters can do it to Flynn, they can do it to anyone. It behooves Judge Emmett Sullivan to rule upon what has been a fraud upon the court from day one – and a fraud upon his court specifically: the documents made public this week were ordered to be handed over to Flynn’s lawyers two years ago (February 2018) but were in fact only coughed up now because Jeff Jensen, a federal prosecutor in St Louis appointed by Attorney-General Bill Barr to look into the DoJ’s conduct of the Flynn case, recently stumbled across them. A system in which prosecutorial misconduct requires a presidential pardon to undo it is not merely absurd but wicked: justice requires that Judge Sullivan extinguish the state’s assault upon his own courthouse.”
He is serving his nation in a mission more dangerous and important than anything he did in the military.
There’s a lot of reason not to pardon Flynn. Even if he is allowed to withdraw his guilty plea (and I think that should be allowed); he did admit to lying. Pardoning Flynn wouldn’t help Trump or Flynn, beyond getting Flynn out of prison. Flynn’s best opportunity to clear his good name is fighting this in court and winning that way. Afterwards, if Trump feels guilty, he could always gift some of his wealth to Flynn.
I say that with a bit of bias. I’m wanting to see Judge Sullivan eat some more humble pie for his bullshit comments about Flynn from the bench. If Sullivan truly believes in what he said to Flynn, then he ought to 1) apologize to Flynn again and 2) tear into the FBI agents involved and hand out some jail time to them. Sullivan was willing to make Flynn do time. Let’s see the true character of the Judge.
“There’s a lot of reason not to pardon Flynn. Even if he is allowed to withdraw his guilty plea (and I think that should be allowed); he did admit to lying. ”
Mark Steyn addresses that as well:
“Oh, but the Comey-Mueller crowd will protest, Flynn confessed to the crime!
Well, sorta: He was prevailed upon to (in the sleazy euphemism) “settle”. I hate settling – because, in the civil courts, it incentivizes the use of litigation as a form of blackmail; and, in the criminal courts, it leads to what happened in the Flynn case: a man confessing to a crime he does not honestly believe he has committed.
So why did he do it? Well, his then lawyers told him to. Why would they do that? Because the dirty rotten stinking corrupt federal justice system wins 99 per cent of its cases, 97 per cent without going to court. Kim Jong-Un’s Attorney-General (assuming he has or needs one) can only marvel. A culture of judicial “settling” is by definition corrupt.”
I agree that his initial lawyers pushed Flynn to cop to a bad plea. But as you have noted from Steyn, pardoning Flynn won’t wipe out the plea. As noted, to wipe out the plea, it need to continue in the courts and the Judge needs to accept it.
Flynn’s new lawyers have requested the plea be withdrawn, but Judge Sullivan denied the request. I think he did so because of all his bluster when Flynn entered the plea to begin with. Flynn entered the plea while also maintaining his innocence, which pissed off Judge Sullivan. Now it is clear why Flynn did what he did, and that should really piss off Judge Sullivan, except this time against the corrupt prosecution.
If Trump pardons, the narrative remains as is. Flynn plead guilty and Trump pardoned him to protect his ally. It doesn’t matter that Trump properly used his pardon power to stop a political prosecution. If Trump doesn’t pardon, Judge Sullivan has an opportunity, if he is truly His Honor, to right the wrong. The delay does cost Flynn his time, money, and livelihood; but he’s about to be the General of a major revolution in our government’s justice system. And he can be made whole on the money side afterwards.
If a Kickstarter (or one of the less “woke” funding sites) to pay Flynn’s legal bills was implemented and advertised on Instapundit, I suspect Flynn would recoup quite a bit of his lost money at this point.
This, along with all of the information emerging on “Russiagate,” is so damning to the Democrats (including those in the Deep State) that the Republican Party has to make it an integral part of the 2020 campaign season – not just to get President Trump reelected, but to throw the Democrat bastards up for Congressional seat the hell out of government.
Will it happen? I wearily doubt it.
I’m so old I can remember the days before the internet and it’s long, easy to access memory, when the feds could get away with this type of thing and it wouldn’t become public for decades. The perps would skate. In the Flynn case, so far, Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Strozk, Lisa Page, and several others are disgraced and out of power. The power brokers who try to run the country in spite of elections are slowly being exposed for the petty tyrants they are. It’s not perfect, but it is getting better. And exposing our two or three tiered justice system for all to see can only help this process.
As far as I know, Clapper and Brennan still hold security clearances. Can’t speak for the rest. The system remains broken.
Comey refused to have his clearance reinstated. The reason: so he couldn’t be effectively deposed on Russiagate, since virtually all of the questions would involve classified information.
Initially, it was a surprise to me that one could refuse being granted a security clearance. But then I recall all of the things one has to sign, and the oath one has to take. Refusing all of that is as definitive a proclamation of one’s untrustworthiness as I can conceive.
How so? They are celebrated in the media and have received a lot of money from media companies and “crowd” funding. Aren’t Clapper and Brennan still employed by their co-conspirators at CNN and MSNBC?