Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Att: ForReal: Russia investigation critics have found their supposed ‘perjury trap’

"Mueller Rejects Flynn’s Attempt to Portray Himself as Victim of the F.B.I."

Except not really.

VIDEO - President Trump, former FBI director James B. Comey and former national security
adviser Michael Flynn's stories are entangled, to say the least. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

By Aaron Blake
December 12

Critics of the Russia investigation think they’ve finally found evidence of something they’ve long warned about: a perjury trap.

As is often the case, they’re reaching.

[...]

Experts, though, say there is almost nothing unusual, illegal or even unethical about how Flynn was treated. There is no requirement that investigators inform subjects who aren’t in custody that they need a lawyer or that lying is illegal. And former federal prosecutor Patrick Cotter said it was the treatment van der Zwaan and Papadopoulos got that was unorthodox — not Flynn’s.

“In the vast majority of such noncustodial interviews of which I am aware — and there are probably hundreds I’ve encountered in my career — there is no explicit warning at all,” Cotter said. “So Flynn not getting a special warning is not in any sense out of the ordinary.”

David Moran, a criminal procedure expert at the University of Michigan who runs the Michigan Innocence Clinic .. https://www.law.umich.edu/clinical/innocenceclinic/Pages/default.aspx , also said Flynn’s treatment is completely par for course. The famous Supreme Court case, Miranda v. Arizona, requires law enforcement to inform those in custody of their rights, but not people such as Flynn who weren’t in custody.

“The tactic of telling a subject not in custody that he or she doesn’t need an attorney present during an interview may be standard, but whether it is savory is a matter of opinion,” Moran said. “Still, it strikes me as odd for a tactic that is used every day with suspected criminals of every description to come under fire only when used against a highly sophisticated, extremely well-connected defendant.”

And that might be the key point here. Van der Zwaan isn’t a U.S. citizen, and Papadopoulos was something of a gadfly foreign policy adviser, so informing them of their rights perhaps made some sense. But Flynn is a three-star general of significant stature, with three advanced degrees. To believe he was lulled into a false sense of security is to believe someone like him wouldn’t know that lying to investigators can get you into trouble and that you might want to have an attorney.

Flynn’s own sentencing memo makes clear he considered and rejected the idea of getting a lawyer. According to McCabe’s account:

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"I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Flynn] and the agents only. I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House Counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice. [Flynn] stated that this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants.”
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Cotter also noted that getting any advance warning of an interview is unusual and that Flynn was lucky to get even that.

“What a lovely world if all citizens got a heads-up call from the deputy director of the FBI before agents showed up to talk with them,” Cotter said. “Flynn was not only not treated unfairly; he was treated in an extraordinarily privileged manner. And he still lied."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/12/russia-investigation-critics-have-finally-found-their-supposed-perjury-trap/?utm_term=.09811aec36d9