The US Presidency 2020

[CBH99]

I’m pretty sure they don’t have to look at that kind of research....

To be fair, that should have been a question to ask behind closed doors and yeah it doesn’t look good. 

But if people are going to attempt to ingest lightbulbs and Lysol or winded based on what the president asked (he didn’t actually say to take the stuff) then that says more about the people doing this to themselves.

Agreed.

If your the type of person to say "Hey honey, the President just asked some guy if injecting disinfectant might work.  Grab the syringe and some lysol babe, we got this!"

Go for it.

 

[kkwd]

A pure fantasy piece presented for your enjoyment.

Budowsky: If Joe Biden were president today

https://thehill.com/opinion/brent-budowsky/495153-budowsky-if-joe-biden-were-president-today

 

[OceanBonfire]

Special Report: Trump told Saudis: Cut oil supply or lose U.S. military support - sources

As the United States pressed Saudi Arabia to end its oil price war with Russia, President Donald Trump gave Saudi leaders an ultimatum.

In an April 2 phone call, Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) started cutting oil production, he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the kingdom, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The threat to upend a 75-year strategic alliance, which has not been previously reported, was central to the U.S. pressure campaign that led to a landmark global deal to slash oil supply as demand collapsed in the coronavirus pandemic - scoring a diplomatic victory for the White House.

Trump delivered the message to the crown prince 10 days before the announcement of production cuts. The kingdom’s de facto leader was so taken aback by the threat that he ordered his aides out of the room so he could continue the discussion in private, according to a U.S. source who was briefed on the discussion by senior administration officials.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-trump-saudi-specialreport/special-report-trump-told-saudis-cut-oil-supply-or-lose-u-s-military-support-sources-idUSKBN22C1V4

 

[kkwd]

As these reporters gaggled one asked Trump if he was going to socially distance during his weekend trip to Camp David. Oh MSM, you do amuse me. You would think John Roberts, or JD as we knew him, would know better.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8279393/Donald-Trump-ends-32-day-lockdown-flying-Camp-David-officials-including-Hope-Hicks.html

 

[kkwd]

It was a great day yesterday. General Flynn is well on his way to vindication. The release of the Intelligence Committee documents containing a lot of interesting information.

 

[Remius]

It was a great day yesterday. General Flynn is well on his way to vindication. The release of the Intelligence Committee documents containing a lot of interesting information.

He himself had plead guilty?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/michael-flynn-learned-to-play-by-trumps-rules/611332/

I guess it was a great day for corruption.

 

[dimsum]

He himself had plead guilty?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/michael-flynn-learned-to-play-by-trumps-rules/611332/

I guess it was a great day for corruption.

Yeah, innocent people definitely plead guilty.  :

 

[QV]

Wrong. 

It was a bad day for corruption, and it's going to get much worse for them thankfully.  And it was Judge Sullivan who didn't believe Flynn's guilty plea was genuine and warned him he would sentence him harshly, which triggered Flynn to retain new counsel.  AG Barr directed a DOJ review of the case which revealed substantial malfeasance by a small group of law enforcement and government lawyers including Flynn's original defence team to pressure, bankrupt and then coerce a guilty plea. The conduct by all involved is abhorrent. Thanks to Judge Sullivan and AG Barr, this travesty is being unravelled.                   

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/fbi-set-up-michael-flynn-to-preserve-trump-russia-probe/

 

[PuckChaser]

Gentle reminder to debate topics or positions, and not make personal attacks to either forum users or political figures IAW Politics Thread guidelines.

- Milnet.ca Staff

 

[QV]

Yeah, innocent people definitely plead guilty.  :

Yes, they do actually. Voluntariness of a confession is a complicated area of law.  Coerced confessions happen.

Many of the rules and norms were broken, on purpose, by the FBI in this case.   

 

[Baz]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/fbi-set-up-michael-flynn-to-preserve-trump-russia-probe/

He was loyal to Trump, not to the intelligence establishment or the “policy community.”

Shouldn't they be loyal to the country, before Trump or the establishment / community?  "I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic."  I'm not taking the democrats "side," because I don't give a crap about the democrats or republicans.  They are all weakening the historic bulwark of democracy in petty squabbles while are potential foes quietly wring their hands in delight, possibly even helping them.

 

[QV]

I'd guess his long career is indicative of his first loyalty, the country.  I'd surmise he was loyal to Trump over the establishment. 

 

[Baz]

I'd guess his long career is indicative of his first loyalty, the country.  I'd surmise he was loyal to Trump over the establishment.

I think you miss the point.  I wasn't talking about him in particular, I'm talking about *all* of them, and what the article implies their loyalty should be to.

Left / right politics, the parties, and individual money and power have become the sought after commodities, not what is best for the population, country, or world.  Which is how it's always been, but not always this blatantly.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>Yeah, innocent people definitely plead guilty.

In the US, they probably do; we just don't know how much (because once they plead, there are usually no trials of the evidence).

Andrew McCarthy, who knows something about the system, has been detailing all the shortcomings since theses things began.  Opinion writers are throwing a tantrum.

The awesomeness of the FBI's conduct continues to emerge.

"FBI policy requires 302 forms to be submitted within five working days of an interview. The FBI took three weeks to deliberate on and compose Flynn’s 302 form"

"FBI supervisors, however, are not supposed to rewrite other agents’ 302 forms [Strzok editing Pietka's 302]. Nor are 302 forms supposed to be edited by FBI personnel who were not present at the interview [Page - Strzok's girlfriend! - editing Pietka's 302], and both of these things happened in the Flynn case."

AG Barr's view, from the CBS interview:
"So there was no mystery about the call. But they initially tried some theories of how they could open another investigation, which didn’t fly. And then they found out that they had not technically closed the earlier investigation. And they kept it open for the express purpose of trying to catch, lay a perjury trap for General Flynn.

They didn’t warn him, the way we usually would be required by the Department. They bypassed the Justice Department. They bypassed the protocols at the White House and so forth. These were things that persuaded me that there was not a legitimate counterintelligence investigation going on."

 

[LittleBlackDevil]

Yeah, innocent people definitely plead guilty.  :

It happens much more than people think, I suspect. There have been several high profile cases of people who pled guilty who were later proven innocent by advances in forensic sciences/DNA testing. Or where it's later determined someone else did it like Anthony Hanemaayer who pled guilty to a 1989 knifepoint sex attack that serial killer Paul Bernardo later confessed to perpetrating. When asked why he pled, Hanemaayer said that he " he succumbed to his fear of being convicted and given a heavy prison sentence."

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers published a report in 2018 suggesting that people plead guilty to avoid greater punishment if they lose at trial despite their innocence: https://www.nacdl.org/Document/TrialPenaltySixthAmendmentRighttoTrialNearExtinct

A quick google search for "innocent people plead guilty" results in numerous articles from reputable sources. 

I don't think General Flynn is immune to these pressures. He is likely a man of personal physical courage, but as I understand it part of Flynn's plea negotiations were that his son, Michael G. Flynn, was expected to avoid charges (cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michael-flynn-charged-with-making-false-statement-to-the-fbi/2017/12/01/e03a6c48-d6a2-11e7-9461-ba77d604373d_story.html). That is a pretty heavy inducement to plead even if you didn't do it, to protect your son.

 

[tomahawk6]

Maybe Queens Law is different but entrapment was committed by the FBI reason enough to set Flynn free.

 

[Jarnhamar]

[quote author=LittleBlackDevil]

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers published a report in 2018 suggesting that people plead guilty to avoid greater punishment if they lose at trial despite their innocence: https://www.nacdl.org/Document/TrialPenaltySixthAmendmentRighttoTrialNearExtinct
[/quote]

I've seen  members in the CAF accused of things and plead guilty/accept punishment to things they were innocent of because they knew pissing off the chain of command was worse than the punishment (guilty of accepting punishment while innocent myself).

 

[FJAG]

Maybe Queens Law is different but entrapment was committed by the FBI reason enough to set Flynn free.

Entrapment, under all common law jurisdictions, including yours, requires the police to set in motion that the criminal commits. Here the offence was completed long before the FBI was involved. In the interview, the accused has the option to tell the truth or to lie. The police may set up a situation wherein which the accused chooses to lie but that's not entrapment. Check your caselaw. It's perfectly legal for the police to use trickery during investigations to lead the accused to believe in a certain fact situation. Again, at the end of the day the accused has the option to lie or not lie.

Flynn is no paragon of virtue.

Stefan Halper, who worked for three Republican presidents and was a longtime informant for the American intelligence community, had a February 2014 encounter with Flynn at a London intelligence conference. Halper became so alarmed by Flynn's close association with a Russian woman that a Halper associate expressed concerns to American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised by Russian intelligence. Flynn was forced out of the DIA six months later, although public accounts at the time cited other reasons for his removal, including his management style and views on Islam.

Remember also that:

Flynn had offered to testify to the FBI or the Senate and House Intelligence committees relating to the Russia probe in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution.[136] However, the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected Flynn's offer for testimony in exchange for immunity.[137] Flynn initially declined to respond to a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, but he and the committee later struck a compromise

and

On December 1, 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller agreed to a plea bargain in which Flynn pleaded guilty to "willfully and knowingly" making "false, fictitious and fraudulent statements" to the FBI regarding conversations with Russia's ambassador. Specifically, Flynn falsely denied that he had asked Russia's ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak on December 29, 2016, "to refrain from escalating ... in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day."[148] Flynn pleaded guilty the same day as such plea bargain and acknowledged that he was cooperating with the investigation by Mueller.

And finally he lied flat out to Vice President Pence which is why he was asked to step down as NSA.

“He didn’t tell the vice president of the United States the facts and then he didn’t remember, and that’s just not acceptable,” Trump told reporters at the White House at his first solo news conference as chief executive.

Seems like with this latest escapade that the Barr fix is in.

op:

 

[Brad Sallows]

He's no paragon of virtue, so that excuses the FBI setting a perjury trap on a matter that lacked "materiality" as explained by Andrew McCarthy (an experienced former prosecuter) and Alan Dershowitz (an experienced defence attorney)? 

Sure.  Let justice be guided and conducted by outrage.

"Seems like with this latest escapade that the Barr fix is in."

Of course it is.  There is no public interest _at all_ in reigning in abusive investigative agencies, regardless what the civil libertarians might have us believe.

McCarthy has it right: "And before you throw this book at me, I didn’t say political or diplomatic lies are admirable. I said they’re not prosecutable. We don’t want the Justice Department monitoring our politics or diplomacy."

 

[FJAG]

The problem isn't some lame excuse culled from some FBI agents notes as to "what is our objective". The problem is that under Barr the Department of Justice has turned into a politicized toady for the presidency. Democracies can recover from some misdeed (and I dispute that there even was one) from some low level bureaucrat. It will be almost impossible to recover from this high-level of perversion of justice and the self-serving division that has been created amongst the people of the US.

The Washington Post got it right :

It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to seek to undo a guilty plea, and comes just months after Attorney General William P. Barr pressed prosecutors in another of Mueller’s cases to soften their sentencing recommendation for the president’s friend and former political adviser Roger Stone.

“Attorney General Barr’s politicization of justice knows no bounds,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Overruling the Special Counsel is without precedent and without respect for the rule of law.”

Shortly before the Justice Department abandoned Flynn’s prosecution, the line prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, formally withdrew — just as the Stone prosecutors had.

In the new filing, Timothy Shea, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote that “continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice,” but current and former law enforcement officials said the decision was a betrayal of long-standing Justice Department principles. Shea, who was tapped by Barr to lead the U.S. attorney’s office, was the only lawyer to sign the filing; no career attorneys affixed their names to it.

“Another pillar in the foundation of the Department of Justice and the rule of law has fallen,” said one federal prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. “The justification for this move is not credible, and it may be used by criminals in the future to escape legitimate prosecution.”

Gregory A. Brower, a former U.S. attorney and former senior FBI official, said the move shows Barr is intent on overturning much of the work done by former FBI director James B. Comey, a longtime target of the president’s wrath.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/justice-dept-moves-to-void-michael-flynns-conviction-in-muellers-russia-probe/2020/05/07/9bd7885e-679d-11ea-b313-df458622c2cc_story.html

I guess your point of view depends very much on who you consider to be the heroes and who you consider to be the villains in this piece of Kabuki theatre.

op: