Today’s Michael Flynn’s news is (only) a sentencing recommendation so what we’re going to get is more inferential material since there’s a lot more folks who still need to get rolled up. By Saturday, the contours of the middle-game should be clearer. What will become obvious is reviewing the nature of Flynn’s work as an unregistered foreign agent and the telling of lies by many more people than Trump.
Beyond illuminating the extent of Flynn's cooperation with Mueller, the memo could provide a window into what the special counsel has found so far in its probe, which began in May 2017.
What won’t be as obvious is the assistance that comes from being cooperative with the Special Counsel. Everyone in the Trump transition team should be worried, as Flynn was a first-mover and hence gets a good deal. There’s much media spinning on Twitter with RW bots trying to declare Flynn a hero. Who would go to a December 18 rally for him.
Just remember that Manafort chose Pence, and Pence chose Flynn.
Lots of redacting in the Mueller document as much is being held close to the vest.
/2 In main section of memo, Mueller's office recommends probation -- a non-custodial sentence.
/3 The Special Counsel also filed a separate memorandum talking about the value of Flynn's cooperation. It's more extensive than I expected (6 pages) given the low sentencing stakes. It is heavily redacted (blacked out).
/4 The redacted addendum says that Flynn provided help in a criminal investigation about [completely blacked out, but not Russia.] Also says that Flynn helped illuminate Trump campaign coordination with Russia. Lots is blacked out -- really nothing revealed.
Flynn, who held the White House job for only 24 days, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. He will be sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Dec. 18.
He is so far the only member of President Donald Trump’s administration to plead guilty to a crime uncovered during Mueller’s wide-ranging investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. election and potential collusion by Trump aides.
Others who have also since been charged by Mueller include Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and campaign deputy Rick Gates, as well as Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen who last week pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Organization skyscraper in Moscow.
Trump has called Mueller’s probe a witch hunt and has denied colluding with Russia. Moscow denies trying to interfere in the elections.
Flynn’s crime of lying to the FBI carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison. However his plea agreement states he is eligible for a sentence of zero to six months and can ask the court not to impose a fine.
www.reuters.com/…
“Pence for sure knew about Flynn and whether he was following orders for Trump or not it rests on him.”
When President Donald Trump tried to stop the FBI investigation of his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was Trump aware of Flynn’s meetings with Turkish officials? If so, it could significantly increase the president’s exposure to political liability and legal wrongdoing involving obstruction of justice.
On Valentine’s Day 2017, the president asked FBI Director James Comey if he could see his “way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” according to Comey’s congressional testimony (see also interview with Donald Trump Jr.). What was Trump wanting Comey to let go exactly? So far the media has focused on federal investigators’ ongoing probe at the time into whether Flynn lied to the FBI, but at the same time there was also an ongoing federal investigation into Flynn’s work on behalf of Turkey–and the White House knew about it. We also now know that on Sept. 19, 2016, and in mid-December 2016, Flynn reportedly met with senior Turkish officials, and discussed the prospect of kidnapping and secretly removing a US resident, cleric Fethullah Gülen, from the United States into Turkey’s custody. If Trump knew about the Turkey meetings at the time of the Feb. 14 exchange with Comey, that would raise a “different order of problem for the President,” Ben Wittes exclaimed on Lawfare’s podcast. Ben’s right.
[...]
One important point to know at the outset: First, it is not only important what the president knew on Feb. 14, but also what he became aware of in the weeks and months afterward. That’s because the president took additional steps to try stop the investigation of Flynn following the Oval Office meeting with Comey. A crucial part of the timeline, for example, is the efforts of the White House to stop the investigation of Flynn in late March 2017 and the revelation of Flynn’s September 2016 meeting with Turkish officials around that same time.
www.justsecurity.org/...
www.justice.gov/...
And there’s that mystery subpoena being fought in the background.
And Roger Stone will plead the Fifth:
"If you are not guilty of a crime, what do you need immunity for?" Trump said at a Florida campaign rally in September.
"The mob takes the Fifth Amendment," Trump said at a subsequent campaign event in Iowa. "If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?"
nordic.businessinsider.com/...
The case against Trump for obstruction of justice just got immeasurably stronger. I’ve written before that Trump already confessed to obstruction, more or less, on national television. His explanation for firing FBI Director James Comey indicated “corrupt intent” to impede the FBI’s investigation of his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia. Comey also testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Trump had repeatedly intervened to protect Flynn specifically. There has been a legal basis for an obstruction of justice case, then, even if there hasn’t been much smoke under all that fire. There is nothing in the statute or the precedents requiring an underlying crime in order to prove obstruction. The crime is called “obstruction of justice,” not “obstruction of investigating guilt.”
Now that Flynn has pleaded guilty to a crime, and now that he reportedly is singling out Jared Kushner, and will probably acknowledge far more as he cooperates with special counsel Robert Mueller, those obstruction charges will now play stronger in the court of public opinion, before actual courts and jurors, and in front of arguably the most important juries, the House and Senate.
Mike Pence and Don McGahn are in trouble. Everyone is rightly focused on Trump’s legal jeopardy, as well as that of Kushner, but another person whose legal fate changed significantly on Friday was Vice President Mike Pence. White House Counsel Don McGahn should also be concerned, as he, like Pence, was involved in Flynn’s appointment during the presidential transition. Pence and McGahn could be facing their own charges of obstruction of justice, even before we learn anything new from Flynn’s cooperation with the special counsel.
slate.com/...