[DoughtyOne]

I agree RitaOK.

I believe in investigations, but I also believe they need to be on the up and up, and not merely gotcha efforts to convict people for process laws so an investigator can claim not to have gone home empty handed.

If a guy is caught in a lie, and there was no criminality to hide, I think a judge should tell the prosecutor to knock it off.

As I understand it, that’s basically what Flynn was taken to task for.

An investigator should not be able to blackmail someone over an immaterial mistake. I would expand that to cover intentional lies too.

Hey, I lied to you. I did nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter because I wasn’t doing it to hide something.

If felt uncomfortable admitting to that, and I lied.

Big deal! Get over it.

[advance_copy]

Hey, I lied to you. I did nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter because I wasn’t doing it to hide something.

Here's something that could be a real kicker. The "lie" was told back in January. At that time, information was leaking like a sieve from Obama supporters in the deep state, including highly classified secrets.

There was also major "hype" about Russia, Russia, Russia just kicking off then. The NY times had a front page article on the very day of inauguration about investigators "wire tapping" the Trump transition team.

So, Flynn's likely motive for lying was not to prevent himself or anyone else from being charged with anything. Rather, he was lying to prevent the content of his discussion with the Russian ambassador from leaking, which would have touched off huge headlines.

Given that the contents of sensitive negotiations with a major foreign power should not be splattered all over the papers as it was sure to do if it leaked, Flynn was just trying to protect the country. And given what we know now about the FBI agent(s) that interviewed him, he was absolutely right.