"“Having risked his life in service to his country, he has found himself the target of a political vendetta designed to strip him of his honor and savings, and to deprive the President of his advice. He has been dragged through the mud and forced, through coercion and the artful withholding of information crucial to his defense, to confess to a crime he did not commit — indeed, to a crime that could not exist,” Powell added."
is building on Barr's Justice Department's dishonesty outlined here
An Ugly Day for the Justice Department
[...]
The Justice Department did not merely contend that Flynn should be allowed to withdraw his plea, as he has been seeking to do. It argued that the entire case should be dismissed with prejudice—meaning that the case should be dismissed in a fashion that would preclude its being refiled. “Continued prosecution of the charged crime,” the motion states, “does not serve a substantial federal interest.”
The government’s 20-page brief is not an honest document—perhaps the reason that it is signed only by Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—and not a single one of the career prosecutors who worked on the case. That may also be the reason why Brandon Van Grack, the prosecutor who has worked the case from the beginning, moved to withdraw .. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6883951/Notice-of-Withdrawal-of-Appearance-by-Assistant.pdf .. from the case entirely just hours before the Justice Department filed its motion.
The brief’s account of the history of the Flynn case is not accurate, its account of the government’s own conduct equally flawed. And it all leads up to a conclusion so obviously wrong that one does not need to know anything about counterintelligence to see through it: that there is no reasonable basis even to interview a senior government official when that person has engaged over sanctions imposed against a foreign adversary government that interfered in an election—and who subsequently lied to the vice president of the United States about the substance of his conversation with an agent of that government. Based on this position, the Justice Department today took an even greater leap: that it is perfectly legal for the official, if interviewed under these circumstances, to lie through his teeth repeatedly to the FBI agents who show up to interview him.
These are quite literally the positions that the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr took today in a U.S. federal court. Here’s the brief:
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