Powel is signaling that she is considering defense provious counsel did not explore, in particular, a claim of selective prosecution.
IV. There Are Serious Fourth Amendment Violations.In addition, there are egregious Fourth Amendment violations at issue in this case. Either Mr. Flynn was (i) the subject of a pretextual counter-intelligence investigation apparently resulting from an FBI/CIA operation routed and funded through the Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense, using Stefan Halper to smear him as an "agent of Russia;" (ii) part of the documented abuses of the NSA database; (iii) the subject of a criminal leak of classified information regarding his conversations with Ambassador Kislyak; (iv) illegally unmasked; or (v) some combination of the above.
Judge Rosemary Collyer, Chief Judge of the FISA court, has already found serious Fourth Amendment violations by the FBI in areas that likely also involve their actions against Mr. Flynn. Much of the NSA's activity is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. Not only did the last administration--especially from late 2015 to 2016--dramatically increase its use and abuse of "about queries" in the NSA database, which Judge Collyer has noted was "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue," it also expanded the distribution of the illegally obtained information among federal agencies.10 Judge Collyer determined that former FBI Director Comey gave illegal unsupervised access to raw NSA data to multiple private contractors. ...
Agree, well written.
The takeaway for most intelligent people should be, never speak to a Fed without Counsel present.
Selective prosecution is a hard claim to prevail on. A claim of a bad faith prosecution might be more productive.
The execrable Susan Rice's email sent to herself on Trump's inauguration day---just hours before she was scheduled to leave purported to document part of the strange meeting Obama held.
As Obama's top security aide, Rice was nervous about the fact that, at the president’s direction, she had failed
“to share information fully as it relates to Russia” with President Trump’s incoming national security team........
NOTE: Rice was being replaced by Gen Flynn.
Her actions violated longstanding American tradition. Outgoing administrations have always cooperated in the transition to a new administration, whether of the same or the opposing party, especially on matters relating to national security.
Susan Rice is far from the brightest bulb on the tree, but she was well aware that by concealing facts ostensibly relating to national security from her counterpart in the new administration–General Michael Flynn–she was, at a minimum, violating longstanding civic norms.
If she actually lied to Flynn, she could have been accused of much worse. So Rice wanted to be able to retrieve her email, if she found herself in a sticky situation, and tell the world that she hid relevant facts about Russia from the new administration on Barack Obama’s orders.
What were the secrets that Obama wanted to keep from the new Trump administration?
We can easily surmise that
<><>the Steele memo was paid for by the Democratic Party;
<><>that the FBI had to some degree collaborated with Steele;
<><>that the Clinton campaign had fed some of the fake news in the dossier to Steele;
<><>that Comey’s FBI had used Steele’s fabrications as the basis for FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
These were among the facts that Obama and his minions didn’t want Michael Flynn and Donald Trump to know. Susan Rice, we can infer, was told to keep these secrets, and if anyone ever asked why she had failed to disclose them to Michael Flynn and others on Trump’s team, or even lied to those people, she would have the defense that President Obama ordered her to do it.
There may be more to it than this. The redacted paragraph likely contains more information about what it was that Rice wasn’t supposed to tell the Trump team. One of these days, we will learn what was blacked out.
The fact that Michael Flynn was Susan Rice’s counterpart in the incoming administration may also be significant. We know that the FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn–even Peter Strzok!–reported that they didn’t think he had lied about anything.
And yet, Obama’s DOJ and Bob Mueller’s “investigation”–basically a continuation of Obama’s corrupt Department of Justice under another, less accountable name–persecuted Flynn to the point where he finally pled guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in order, as he says, to end the madness and the financial drain.
Why were the Democrats so determined to discredit General Flynn? Perhaps because they wanted to pre-empt any outrage that may otherwise have followed on revelations that the Obama administration’s National Security Advisor hid important facts from Gen Flynn, her successor, during the transition, and may have lied to him about those facts, in violation of all American tradition.