If prosecutors are rethinking their cooperation deal with former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn they’re keeping those cards close to their chest in a new filing with the judge overseeing Flynn’s case.
Flynn’s lawyers are causing the prosecutors to stop cooperation with him and reevaluate whether their sentencing recommendation and whether he has complied with the deal. Are his lawyers representing Flynn or doing Trump’s bidding? I can’t tell. Did Flynn keep things from Mueller? Is Trump trying to keep Flynn in line and lure him with the promise of a pardon and then let him serve jail time during the 2020 election cycle? I think there’s more here than meets the eye.
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn they’re keeping those cards close to their chest in a new filing with the judge overseeing Flynn’s case.
They have been ordered by William Barr to sabotage the case, and they are trying to piss off the judge.That works better than a pardon.
Translation: Flynn is not cooperating with us, and how much more jail time we’re going to ask for depends on whether he lies as a witness in support of the defendant in the upcoming trial.
Flynn has seemed quite desperate to avoid even a day in jail, he won’t be content with a pardon down the road. His bribe has probably already been signed and is super-secret squirreled away so that the prosecutors and judge don’t catch wind of it.
Best informed speculation I have seen, so far.
I don’t trust Department of Justice prosecutors anymore. They are just playing a smoke and mirrors kabuki-theater shell game for Putin and his whores in the White House and elsewhere in the United State government and military.
Well, SDNY seems to be existing in its own little world apart from the rest. Maybe their e-mail server crashed and they didn’t get the updated policies from Barr that anything remotely linked to Trump is now off-limits?
Powell is gunning for a pardon and her entire shtick is to manufacture a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the woman whose claim to fame is writing a book about how unfair and “licensed to lie” federal prosecutors are, using Enron and Andersen as the examples because everyone knows what really matters is when prosecutors get overly aggressive against giant, privileged-white-man-owned, billion-dollar corporate labor-abusing political donor machines…that’s the REAL story of overly aggressive and corrupt prosecution and law enforcement in this country, not what they do to millions of minorities every goddamn day. What they’ve unfairly done to poor innocent money-grubbing vacuous black holes of avarice like those two was simply unconscionable because they were supposed to be entitled to ignore the law, dontcha know?
well, same here…she’s got a story she always wants to tell and she’s going to make sure she creates clownshow enough to let her tell it. She’s now trying to manufacture a narrative that supports her shtick and lets her claim the prosecutors are corrupt and lawless and overly aggressive against Flynn and SHE is doing it by being the one PLAYING COY and changing stories and being overly aggressive in the strained interpretation she insists applies to the previous attorney’s notes (the meetings from which they were generated she wasn’t present for) etc., all to try to manufacture the public appearance that Flynn is getting shafted, railroaded, patsied for a witch hunt. She plans enriching herself with another book about this, don’t you doubt, and hopes maybe getting Flynn a pardon in the process will make it a best seller.
And BTW, TPM, the prosecutors aren’t “playing coy.” They’re quite clearly indicating that they think Flynn will lie on the stand or otherwise breach his cooperation agreement if he testifies and they are telling Sullivan that they can’t make any sentencing recommendations until they see what Flynn decides to do with the rope he’s gathered for himself.
ETA: Yeah, there’s a reason the 3 glowing reviews of her book, “License to Lie”, on Amazon are some CEO, a former manager from PricewaterouseCoopers and an elderly white man Louisianan law professor emeritus who wrote a bunch of shit for National Review. Well, maybe two reasons…first of which is she and they are all kkklowns. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the other.
Or maybe they did, and their collective reaction was something like - “Here, hold my beer…”
What’s the over/under on whether Trump really regrets firing Preet Bharara…
And what’s he been up to lately?
Dinner dates with old colleagues?
Bharara would have done the same.
BTW, he and Anne Milgram had a fascinating discussion of the many astounding ways in which the Epstein settlement violated norms and ethics on their CAFE Insider podcast. Which is by subscription, but some of it is excerpted on Bharara’s Stay Tuned podcast.
Maybe for the guy on trial, but not for Flynn. Flynn’s already done and guilty. Remember, this is centering around the prosecution of someone else before Judge Furman. Judge Yosemite Sam Sullivan is the one who will determine whether Flynn goes to the clink, and if he thinks Flynn played games or changed stories or even flirted with breaching his cooperation agreement, he could give him a whole lot more than a few months in Club Fed…and Sullivan is not only a total hardass but also NUTS.
That being said, you may be on to something. I really have to wonder what Reichsmarschall Barr and Hair Furor might fear could come out of the trial of this Bijan character, especially if he cracks and begs for a plea deal mid-trial.
Flynn must have an angle here because I can’t imagine someone would put all their hopes for freedom on tRump holding up his end of a deal.
I do love the positively British level of understatement by the prosecutors here.
His new lawyers insist that he did not know they were false at the time he filed them and that that’s what he has consistently told investigators. The government, in one of the newly unsealed docs in the Rafiekian case, said it does “not necessarily agree with these characterizations.”
Especially because a 3-star General couldn’t possibly be read up on laws and regulations…
Flynn has zero leverage unless there’s something he has held back from prosecutors that would hurt Trump. I think Trump is angling for Flynn to sit in jail during the election cycle.