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