I am basing my comment on the contents of this post alone. The poster’s take on the matter is superficial, and as with ALL the legal analysis on our side in the Flynn case (including Powell’s), fails to make distinctions.
As I have said before on this site, people get the “exceedingly slow” part of the saying, but they do not get, or even consider, the “exceedingly fine” part of the saying.
Legal analysis is all about distinctions based on context. The contexts change and the distinctions change with them. For instance, Powell readily demonstrated her gross incompetence by yelling Brady and citing the Steven’s case.
Witnesses commit perjury all the time during testimony. One of the principal duties of a jury is to determine who is telling the truth, both in terms of veracity and reliability. To give a judge power to hold someone in contempt for perjury during trial is giving a judge too much power to interfere in a jury’s authority.
A guilty plea is an entirely different legal context. A guilty plea implicates hugely significant duties of a judge, and the plea is a very special and specific interaction between a judge and a defendant.
An oath is administered before a guilty plea because it is essential (in many ways I will not go into here) that a defendant be scrupulously truthful to the judge while pleading guilty. There may be a dozen aspects of the plea of crucial significance, all dependent upon a defendant telling the utter truth.
A person is not entitled to lie to a judge just because the lie is told during a guilty plea. And a judge who is lied to his face is properly entitled to hold a person in contempt. Ask any judge in America, from village court to Supreme Court, what he thinks about people in court lying to his face.
Powell was grossly incompetent in this case. And every time I post that opinion there is an explosion of lawyers on our side who rush to assure us how brilliant Powell is. What they never do is write a post explaining her legal strategy in coherent terms, citing the actual law, and addressing the objection’s to Powell’s incoherent legal strategy and poor grasp of legal analysis.
Powell blundered her way into having Flynn commit perjury. No one on our side has even addressed that issue, because they cannot. That blunder alone (which I predicted before it happened) demonstrates Powell’s incompetence. But it is one example of many.
I have never doubted for one instant the corruption which lead to Flynn’s case. What I am questioning is how Powell handled the case after she took over.
And otherwise I am amazed at the people on our side, lawyers in particular, who keep doubling down on Flynn despite having no idea what they are talking about.
Can you clarify? Do you mean by withdrawing his original plea?
I’m not arguing your legal analysis but this Judge basically told Flynn that if he wanted any lip service from him, he would rattle his zipper. He did this when he called Flynn a traitor based upon the “evidence” that DOJ presented and from his watching of MSNBC. If Flynn would have tried to tell the truth that he was be railroaded and his kid threatened with prosecution, the judge would have probably charged him with contempt on the spot.
Flynn had poor legal representation that had a conflict of interest as the lawyers involved for both parties actually worked for the same law firm.
Powell wasn’t even Flynn’s attorney during the guilty plea and plea questioning stage of the trial. That was when Holders law firm was counsel. I encourage you to refresh yourself on the actual events before you start blanket criticism of fellow posters the disagree with you.