In advance of a status report due tomorrow, Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the Mike Flynn case... (Emptywheel quotes from the AP Newswire for more details)
Van Grack was apparently the point person on the Flynn courtroom case, and without him the government can longer proceed...
While Van Grack has withdrawn from all Flynn-related cases before Emmet Sullivan, he has not yet withdrawn from two other open cases he’s on, and he signed his withdrawal FARA Chief.
As noted in this post, Sullivan has discretion over whether to accept this withdrawal...
Sullivan is the trial judge overseeing all this, including the plea deal. The deal itself apparently is far enough along that the judge can still accept it, but without a prosecutor to argue for that it's unlikely to happen.
Emptywheel covers a lot of the issue with the case standing in a separate article:
Note that just Acting US Attorney Timothy Shea signed this filing, which may create a similar kind of dynamic at the DC US Attorney’s Office regarding this action as Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone sentencing did. Barr transparently removed the Senate approved US Attorney for DC, installed his flunky, and then had his flunky renege on statements that DOJ (even DOJ under Barr) had made in the past. It is a breathtaking abuse of power, and it’s likely that Sullivan will regard it as such.I encourage you to follow Emptywheel's link, because she lays out the three key parts of Shea's arguments and then spells out how each of them are flawed, and how Barr's DOJ is making arguments that already failed in Sullivan's court room and still fail a lot of legal logic anyway.
This kind of self-sabotage to a court matter that had been in the works for years is an obvious attempt by trump to get his cronies to sweep away the history of his involvement in Russia's actions against the United States during the 2016 elections.
trump has always been upset about the situations involving his campaign helpers like Paul Manafort - found guilty in a trial early on - or Roger Stone - who also risked a trial and was found guilty as well - because while they didn't directly prove what trump did to cheat, the close interconnection of criminal to criminal - all of it tied to either trump or Russia - was a guilt-by-association that could dog trump for whatever time he's got left before his scams run out.
As such, trump would scream and proclaim it was all a conspiracy, all a witch hunt pushed by a Deep State that favored the "more evil" Hillary and Obama.
And now, with the likelihood that Flynn - who had been caught in a web of backroom deals and crazy plots - will walk away with a clean slate, trump is likely going to crow the whole thing was never real. Unlike the risk of pardoning his cronies - because those pardons could compel them to testify against trump himself later on - this creates the wriggle room trump and his media allies can use to hammer at critics until the media - and the rest of the nation - give up and look away from these eyesores.
Criminals love to deny that the crimes they committed - even when caught - never really happened. Even with the pile of bodies and burning wreckage left in their wake.
trump just happens to be at the head of a crime cartel able to force those lies onto our entire nation.
he and his cronies would wipe away every last shred of evidence from the history books if they can.
We dare not let them.
1 comment:
This was all to save Fergus the bad optics of pardoning Flynn in an election year.
Should the judge reject it, watch for Fergus to wait until after the election to pardon him (and the rest of his felons) either as a second term president or a lame duck.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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