Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Flynn case issues
Way back in 1996, when the Trump presidency was in the two-decades-distant future, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this to say:
The prospect remains that an overzealous prosecutor or investigator — aware that a person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal case — will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those acts, and receiving a false denial…
…[Law’s] encompassing formulation arms Government agents with authority not simply to apprehend lawbreakers, but to generate felonies, crimes of a kind that only a Government officer could prompt.
She certainly was correct. But I wonder what she’d be saying now.
At any rate, we’re in the situation in which government officials are creating crimes (or alleged crimes) that would otherwise not occur, and using them for political destruction.
“we’re in the situation in which government officials are creating crimes (or alleged crimes) that would otherwise not occur, and using them for political destruction.”
And they imagine that if Trump is neutralized, that will be the end of it. Which indicates a willful blindness to the historical and sociological factors that led to Trump’s election. They imagine that they can vote away our inalienable rights. Which indicates a complete lack in understanding just who they are dealing with…
Not that they will but they could gain great insight into the mind set of those who oppose them by viewing this speech by Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas “Speech on Guns by Virginia Senate Candidate Causes Democrat Walk-Out, Goes Massively Viral Online”.
Their refusal to consider civil, reasoned debate has democrats stereotyping we on the right as neanderthals. It is increasingly likely to be a fatal mistake.
Just read that Team Muller refused to hand over the original 302 to the Judge.
The next two years will be Cluster F.
Knowing who he was, but never having read any of his works, I have only recently run across several quotes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn which I think are particularly perceptive and profound.
I just saw these quotes today in an article by Michael Walsh in the December 13th, 2018 issue of “American Greatness” titled, “Does the Unfortunate 20th Century Foretell a Worse 21st?,” which focused on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis of the condition of the West, and which I thought expressed a key insight about our situation today.
Said Solzhenitsyn, in part, in his 1983 speech in London, upon receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion,
“ It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends. Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood.
The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness,” a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make daily concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss.”
Walsh, the article’s author, adding in the article’s last paragraph, the very troubling question,
“Will the 21st century be even more unfortunate than its predecessor? With the West abandoning its centuries-old faith, just as one almost as old rises up to challenge and extinguish it, what do we propose to substitute? Secular humanism is no match for jihad. The end result of moral nihilism, as the Soviets demonstrated, is death and destruction on an industrial scale; if man is the sole measure of all things, we are in bigger trouble than we know—because, God knows, left to our own devices, we’re just not up to the task. “
See https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/13/does-the-unfortunate-20th-century-foretell-a-worse-21st/
I have some faith in Judge Emmett Sullivan.
He seems to have a sensitive bullshit detector. He came down hard on the prosecution in the Ted Stevens case, and recommended sanctions.
A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, speaking in a slow and deliberate manner that failed to conceal his anger, said that in 25 years on the bench, he had “never seen mishandling and misconduct like what I have seen” by the Justice Department prosecutors who tried the Stevens case.
Judge Sullivan’s lacerating 14-minute speech, focusing on disclosures that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence in the case, virtually guaranteed reverberations beyond the morning’s dismissal of the verdict that helped end Mr. Stevens’s Senate career.
Of course, mission accomplished and Stevens was defeated in his re-election bid.
A lot of people are counting on Sullivan to throw out the whole Flynn case and add costs to compensate him for the abuse he has suffered.
That was so long ago that the ACLU still believed in due process and freedom of speech. Even for people they didn’t like.
I watched the video at the “Future of Capitalism” site. She was speaking at Aspen in May, last year. It struck me that she definitely had all her marbles and was quite self-possessed and poised at that time.
I also followed a link in the article to an Algemeiner piece that mentioned long Jewish tradition against using self-incrimination as proof of guilt, and cited Maimonides in particular as pointing that out.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/08/29/michael-cohen-guilty-plea-runs-afoul-of-maimonides/
Thanks for the posting, Neo. Very interesting.
Above: “she” — J. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Here’s an obliquely related item. Ever wonder what has happened to some of Hollywood’s more conservative or independent minded film makers? How about John McTiernan? He’s nobody special, just the creator/director behind Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Medicine Man, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Basic. It’s not like any of those made much money.
So what happened to him after Basic? He went to a federal prison for 4 months. Why? A summary of McTiernan’s involvement with the infamous Anthony Pellicano case is given here, and again here.
Imagine that. Some unidentified schmuck calls you on the telephone, then oops, you just lied to an FBI agent! This is really possible? I knew before that he went to prison, but I had no idea until today that the reason was yet another FBI process crime.
According to the Hollywood Reporter he was (at the time of the Pellicano case)one of the most despised people in Hollywood. His conviction was appealed to the Ninth Circuit and was completely overturned. Then he was retried with the same judge as before and convicted again, this time with a 1 year sentence, but sentenced pending appeal.
While McTiernan does appear to be interested in conservative themes, he doesn’t fit a stereotypical mold. The mini-gun/gatling gun scene in Predator was put in because he got pissed off at the producers “wanting a bunch of gun porn” in McTiernan’s words. He also hates the modern comic book film heroes because their super-human heroism gets a lot of young men killed.
He may be a real jerk and criminal for all I know, but the story stinks of a hit job to me.
She certainly was correct. But I wonder what she’d be saying now.
“wha, eh, oh, darn, i was having such a good nap”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/right-wing-mythmaking-of-michael-flynn
Some cautions, but not much more than a contrary opinion, to counter-balance York’s work perhaps.
Counter-point to the contrary opinon cited above.
So, Comey just admitted on TV that he lied to Congress??
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/12/14/comey-he-wouldnt-have-tried-an-fbi-ambush-like-flynns-with-a-different-administration/
“Wallace: What did he think they were coming over there for?
Comey: Uh, I don’t think he knew. … I…no, we didn’t tell him. Just said, “We’re sending over a couple of agents, they want to ask you some questions” – I didn’t have this conversation, my deputy director did – but, “hope you’ve got a few minutes, you can sit down and talk to them.” And he said, “Sure.”
…
The impression that Comey is proud of ambushing Flynn is inescapable. What’s remarkable about it, at the very least, is that Comey is so clearly describing an ambush, and seems to have no fear of exposing his operation of the FBI in that manner.
…
I wouldn’t expect Comey to go into detail on this background with Wallace in an informal interview setting. But it’s disingenuous to represent when Flynn “came to the FBI’s attention” as if it wasn’t until Mike Pence said something on a Sunday morning news show that seemed to conflict with what the FBI had recordings of Flynn doing. “Disingenuous” here being another word for “simply not true.”
…
Comey’s meaning appears repeatedly to be that, at the time of the interview with Flynn – or, by implication, immediately after it – it was “clear” that Flynn was lying. Comey says this several times.
Yet Comey testified to Congress twice in March 2017 that his agents had said Flynn showed no deception in the 24 January 2017 interview. Although we don’t have transcribed words from one of those events, we have them from the other, and the wording doesn’t indicate that Comey conveyed to Congress a conviction that Flynn had been lying.”
I thought he didn’t remember any of this stuff?
LYNN HARGROVE on December 14, 2018 at 6:21 pm at 6:21 pm said:
Just read that Team Muller refused to hand over the original 302 to the Judge.
The next two years will be Cluster F.
* * *
Someone agrees with you.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/12/14/mueller-filing-on-flynn-interview-does-not-include-interview-notes-original-302/
“At this point, it’s hard not to draw this conclusion: Robert Mueller is trying to delay the process of Michael Flynn’s sentencing, by failing to comply fully with Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order to produce the records of the Flynn interview on 24 January 2017.
We can only guess why Mueller would want to drag this out. The simplest, most obvious explanation would be that Mueller either doesn’t have original documents from the FBI, because they were (for some inexplicable reason) never produced, or lost; or because the original documents would undermine the basis of Mueller’s perjury case against Flynn.
…
In other words, the last item is the record of what Peter Strzok told an interviewer about the Flynn interview, six months after the Flynn interview. It appears to be the basis of the 302 dated 22 August 2017, or at least that’s what Byron York concludes. (The language seems to match up, at any rate.)
…
The bottom line on this is that Mueller has apparently not filed anything that would provide evidence of Flynn’s lying. All we seem to have is Mueller’s word for it that Flynn lied in the interview. Nothing on paper documents what the lie was, or how it was elicited from Flynn by the interviewing agents, Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka.
Instead of that evidence, Mueller constructs a case that in January 2017, Flynn contradicted what the FBI knew to be true about his discussions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – not in the 24 January interview, but in commentary by Flynn or others recorded in the media.
Indeed, Mueller presents – somewhat startlingly, in my view – the David Ignatius article from the Washington Post on 12 January 2017, as the basis for claiming that Flynn was lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
…
The Ignatius article was the fruit of a felony crime (the leak of classified information from someone in the Obama administration). It’s also hearsay. It’s not clear why Mueller would brief the court on that basis, rather than under seal using the original intelligence, which the court is fully competent to review and assess.
This is an especially significant question after the judge ordered the production of original documents, and got back instead records that do not meet the FBI standard for documenting the original interview as evidence.
Maybe the brief against Flynn was written more for public consumption than for Judge Sullivan’s benefit. If so, Sullivan doesn’t sound like the kind of judge who will suffer gladly such political grandstanding on his court’s time.
Assuming nothing else has been filed under seal, the whole situation is inexcusable, in the literal sense.
…
As others like Sara Carter have noted, the unredacted portions of what Mueller did file tell us what we’ve been hearing all along: that Strzok and Pientka saw no sign in the interview that Flynn was lying, or had consciousness of lying. They also tell us Andrew McCabe indeed advised Flynn to the effect that “the quickest” way to close the loop on the FBI’s questions would be to have an interview with only Flynn and the agents present.
Once again, we are faced with the question: What kind of show are these people running?”
Sara Carter has some good posts up on the topic.
https://saraacarter.com/fbi-docs-reveal-flynn-was-not-lying-or-did-not-think-he-was-lying/
“The July 2017 report, however, was the interview with Strzok. It described his interview with Flynn but was not the original Flynn interview.
The apparent discrepancies in with the 302s documents of the interview are being questioned by may former senior FBI officials, who state that there are stringent policies in place to ensure that the documents are guarded against tampering.
On Thursday, FBI Supervisory Agent Jeff Danik told SaraACarter.com that Sullivan must also request all the communications between the two agents, as well as their supervisors around the August 2017 time-frame in order to get a complete and accurate picture of what transpired. Danik, who is an expert in FBI policy, says it is imperative that Sullivan also request “the workflow chart, which would show one-hundred percent, when the 302s were created when they were sent to a supervisor and who approved them.”
He stressed, “the bureau policy – the absolute FBI policy – is that the notes must be placed in the system in a 1-A file within five days of the interview.” Danik said that the handwritten notes get placed into the FBI Sentinel System, which is the FBI’s main record keeping system.
“Anything beyond five business days is a problem, eight months is a disaster,” he added.
In the redacted 302 report Strzok and Pientka said they “both had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.” Information that Flynn was not lying was first published and reported by SaraACarter.com.”
Side note on the entire Collusion Case.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/12/14/what-matters-about-russian-maria-butina-pleading-guilty-to-a-conspiracy-count/
“f Butina really recognized in 2015 that “Republicans were likely to take control of the presidency,” she was among a very select few with special, counterintuitive prevision. Be that as it may, she is accused of “orchestrating” an NRA trip to Russia — more reprehensible, no doubt, than merely arranging one — and of infiltrating a National Prayer Breakfast, an operation that apparently consisted of showing up for it, in company with some other people.
…
Additional note: the judge in this case is the one Obama appointed in a most unusual way, Tanya Chutkan. Chutkan has unaccountably cropped up in two Fusion GPS cases, as well as Butina’s, and is the judge who ushered Imran Awan out the door with a pat on the head and a near-apology for all he’d had to suffer being prosecuted for bank fraud in federal court.
In passing, we shouldn’t really make light of this little drama, in part because Russian espionage is real, and never to be dismissed. But it’s also because, with a plea agreement, we’ll never have good insight into what this has all really been about — and the case will have implications for the contacts and activities of Americans abroad. If the case isn’t made that Butina was acting as a foreign agent — i.e., the agent of a foreign government — then “conspiring” to influence U.S. politics takes on a different hue. A lot of Americans participate in organizations in foreign countries and leverage that participation to try to influence those countries, whether the topic is politics, social phenomena, economics, etc. Setting the precedent of criminalizing those activities isn’t necessarily a good idea. Reciprocity can work in bad ways as well as good ones.
But here, as promised, is the one thing that matters about this plea. Assuming the prosecutor’s account of her connections is accurate, Butina took it because it’s what the Russians told her to do. She’s not her own woman in this. If the plea and whatever cooperation she gives the prosecutor produce unfavorable consequences for Trump, it’s because Putin wants them to.
On the face of it, it seems Russia originally decided to back a fight in court for Butina (perhaps for the prospect of discovery), and now has had her cop a plea. I’d be very wary of anything that comes from her cooperation with the prosecutor. It won’t be coming, honestly and uninfluenced, from the prosecutor, the investigative powers of the FBI, or Butina. It will be coming from Vladimir Putin.”
Well…this is interesting.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/14/mystery-mueller-subpoena-fight-1065409
“Special counsel Robert Mueller appeared to be locked in a subpoena battle with a recalcitrant witness Friday in a sealed federal appeals courtroom, the latest development in a mystery case that has piqued the curiosity of Mueller-obsessives and scoop-hungry journalists.
Oral arguments in the highly secretive fight played out behind closed doors under tight security. Officials at the U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C. even took the extraordinary measure of shutting down to the public the entire fifth floor, where the hearing was taking place.
More than a dozen reporters who had been staked out in the hallway adjacent to the courtroom — in the hopes of eyeballing attorneys for Mueller or the mystery appellant’s lawyers — were kicked off the floor and lost their best chance to spot anyone involved in the months-long legal dispute as they were entering or exiting the chambers.”
Julie near Chicago on December 14, 2018 at 9:19 pm at 9:19 pm said:
…
I also followed a link in the article to an Algemeiner piece that mentioned long Jewish tradition against using self-incrimination as proof of guilt, and cited Maimonides in particular as pointing that out.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/08/29/michael-cohen-guilty-plea-runs-afoul-of-maimonides/
* * *
Excellent article – thanks for suggesting it.
One more entry in the long line of Dems being “for it before they were against it”.
“Here the parallels, echoes, and contrasts are striking. President Trump’s description of the Robert Mueller and Russia collusion investigation as a “witch hunt” is precisely the phrase used to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy for his own investigations into Russian influence.
…
In a 2014 note in the New York University Law Review, “Maimonides, Miranda, and the Conundrum of Confession: Self-Incrimination in Jewish and American Legal Traditions,” Becky Abrams Greenwald cites the 1964 case Escobedo v. Illinois. In that case, an opinion by Justice Goldberg warned, “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.”
Ms. Greenwald writes that Goldberg’s views “echo the centuries of both American and Jewish concern that systems founded on self-incriminating statements may prove fatally, fundamentally unsound.”
None of this is to say that the US government should adopt Judaism’s approach to confession-based convictions, which is even more restrictive than the Fifth Amendment. Nor is it to say that the McCarthy and Mueller situations are precisely the same.
It is to suggest, though, that these concerns about self-incrimination in Jewish and American law — risks of injustice, threats to human dignity — are worth careful consideration. The same civil liberties that protect accused communists or street criminals may also protect the president or his lawyer. They protect us all.”
Geoffrey Britain on December 14, 2018 at 6:11 pm at 6:11 pm said:
…
Not that they will but they could gain great insight into the mind set of those who oppose them by viewing this speech by Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas “Speech on Guns by Virginia Senate Candidate Causes Democrat Walk-Out, Goes Massively Viral Online”.
Their refusal to consider civil, reasoned debate has democrats stereotyping we on the right as neanderthals. It is increasingly likely to be a fatal mistake.”
Apropos Del. Freitas’s speech:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves
“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”
Breaking News — or maybe just a replay of Old Habits
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/obstruction-mueller-probe-wiped-strzok-phone-before-giving-it-to-investigators/
“The report reveals disturbing details about the inner workings and lack of transparency in the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election for the past 575 days and has failed to publicize any evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion.”
The OIG report found that all of the texts off of Strzok’s and Page’s mobile phones that they had received while they were working for the special counsel’s office (SCO) were deleted.”
Wiped with one of Hillary’s cloths, no doubt.
(via PowerLine)
I think Sullivan is working his way to throwing out the Flynn case and ordering he be reimbursed court and legal costs.
Mike, I would love that idea, but then (once again) we taxpayers end up paying for both sides of the legal dispute.
Somehow that seems wrong.
I think prosecutors ought to be assessed a personal fine for bringing cases they lose for malfeasance (not just losing, because that’s even more incentive to cheat).