Just because you believe this to be true, doesn't make it so. The evidence on Flynn's investigation didn't persuade Judge Sullivan that he was entrapped, railroaded, or whatever term you want to use when Flynn's lawyer tried to use it last time. Some FBI notes came out, and I don't see how they substantially changed the facts surrounding the case.

I'm not sure it's even worth debating. You have the narrative in your head of what went on, and then there's the reality. Barr dropping the case was about as abnormal as it gets, so Judge Sullivan is responding in kind. Who knows, it probably will still get dropped, but hopefully we get some good transcripts for the history books. DOJ's arguments are fucking laughable.

This post was edited by IceMage on May 13 2020 07:08pm

When a simple question is met with a wall of text and only the middle part actually addresses the question as if to hide the answer, usually that means it's all bullshit.

I have not followed this closely, but when I've read people on the right say anything none of it has been very well founded.

I guess the argument is "they shouldn't have interviewed him, so anything that comes from the interview is irrelevant, like a bad traffic stop".

This post was edited by Thor123422 on May 13 2020 07:09pm

He wasn't under oath. He was the National Security Advisor and a couple FBI agents came by his office to ask him questions and intentionally sought to disarm him and avoid him seeking legal counsel. They took advantage of the presumption of good faith cooperation between departments and set up the interview as an ambush, and Comey openly admitted that he was exploiting Flynn's assumption of good faith.

And it is entrapment, since its a crime that wouldn't exist but for the FBI seeking to coerce someone into committing it. Flynn would not have lied to the FBI but for them trying to get him to lie to them- they induced it, and he was in no way seeking to lie to the FBI- only their proactive measures to get him to lie to them could accomplish that. It wasn't a fact material to their investigation since they already knew from the wiretaps the truth, and the investigation was already supposed to be closed and had no legal justification to keep going when they decided to trap Flynn into lying to them for the explicit purpose of getting him fired or prosecuted, saying right in their notes that it was political games that even Obama would frown on if he found out.

What was he specifically charged with if he wasn't under oath?

Your description does not rise to the level of coercion.

Oh, and abusing the presumption of good faith is a totally fair thing in the investigators toolkit. Ever heard of good cop bad cop? The bad cop isn't the one there to get answers.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on May 13 2020 07:18pm

That's only one part of the argument.
Its more

1. They shouldn't have interviewed him, they lacked legal justification to do so, therefore anything that comes from it is fruit of the poisonous tree
2. They were explicitly attempting to induce him to lie to them where no predisposition to lie to the FBI existed, fulfilling both prongs of entrapment
3. They suppressed exculpatory evidence and premised their investigation on manufactured evidence and leaks to the media, establishing both prosecutorial and FBI misconduct
4. They obliterated the presumption of good faith between the intelligence community with their palace intrigue. No IC officials are going to talk to the FBI without lawyers present anymore
5. The whole thing was a petty political game and corrupt abuse of power, like J Edgar Hoover married Le Carre and gave birth to Comey and McCabe.



"Lying to the FBI" is a charge that doesn't require an oath like perjury.



Hell no it isn't. Not between our intelligence community officials. They weren't investigating some random terrorist suspect detained in abingadubad habeebistan. They were ambushing the NSA.
After 9/11 we got reminded that our IC was basically a jurisdictional pissing competition with each department becoming increasingly protective and guarding their databases and human assets. We had a bunch of reforms aimed at streamlining the cooperation between departments so that we don't get those colossal intelligence failures that result in hundreds of deaths when the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. Its the whole reason the ODNI exists, to coordinate the children and make sure they play nice with each other. Well, wave goodbye to all of that. The national security adviser to the president couldn't talk to a couple FBI agents who casually walked by his office without it turning out to be a preplanned ambush to destroy him.
Why would any official from the CIA, NSA, DHS, Naval Intelligence, etc ever talk to the FBI again, knowing that they could be walking into an ambush? They'll lawyer up preemptively and refuse to disclose anything sensitive.

This post was edited by Goomshill on May 13 2020 07:30pm

"dishonest media manipulation" lol... As opposed to honest media manipulation?

https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-flynn-interview-was-predicated



Whole article is worth a read. It's a laughable talking point.

Oh here's a fun one for the timeline

from the list of unmasking requests
Joe Biden: January 12th

what leaked to the media on January 12th?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-did-obama-dawdle-on-russias-hacking/2017/01/12/75f878a0-d90c-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html


I hope that unnamed senior US government official leaked it by phone and not an in-person meeting with a young female journalist. Well, don't think he'd grab David Ignatius

IceMage's post seems to show that there was good reason to conduct the interview, and lets be honest, conducting a semi-formal or informal interview should require an exceedingly low bar. Even being only of tertiary relevance to an ongoing case would clear it in my book.

You haven't shown me anything that suggests they were trying to get him to lie. If they knew he had been saying one thing then interviewed him to confirm that thing, and that thing was false and he had been lying... that's on him. The fact that they knew he was lying about it and talked to him just shows they were, again, acting exactly how investigators should act.

#3 is just more red herrings

Dude, you're gonna have to stop parroting the "good faith" point. Abusing good faith to catch somebody you suspect of illegal activity is not only a fair tactic, it's expected of any good investigator. If I found that they were foregoing interviews for "good faith" I'd want them out.

Last "point" is your interpretation, which in my opinion you haven't met the burden on, and since you're using certain arguments that are nonsensical like "abusing the good faith" it really leads me to suspect you are just reaching for anything so you can keep that conclusion.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/13/judge-sullivan-to-judge-gleeson-pick-flynns-perjury/

Interesting article. How many counts of perjury is Flynn guilty of?