Posted on 05/21/2020 2:06:17 PM PDT by gwjack
A federal appeals court on Thursday ordered the judge handling the criminal case of President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, to respond to a request by Flynn’s lawyers to dismiss the case.
The order came two days after Flynn’s lawyers asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to drop the case and assign any future court proceedings to another judge.
The Department of Justice two weeks earlier made the surprise move to abandon its own prosecution of Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
But U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan did not immediately grant the DOJ’s motion to dismiss its case. Instead, he appointed a former federal judge to argue against the request, and submitted a schedule to allow third parties to submit arguments in the case.
Flynn’s lawyers had argued to the appeals court that Sullivan’s moves “reveal his plan to continue the case indefinitely, rubbing salt in General Flynn’s open wound from the Government’s misconduct and threatening him with criminal contempt.”
Sullivan has 10 days to respond to the appeals court’s order. Sidney Powell, an attorney for Flynn, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the order.
Flynn had appeared in Sullivan’s courtroom in December 2018 to be sentenced, but the retired lieutenant general opted to delay the proceeding after Sullivan warned Flynn may face jail time if he was sentenced before completing his cooperation with then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
Months later, Flynn dismissed his legal team and hired Powell, a vocal Mueller critic, who soon began efforts to undo the criminal case. Powell accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory information from Flynn, a claim that the Justice Department for months repeatedly denied.
The Justice Department’s request this month to dismiss the charge against Flynn was signed by Timothy Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C. at the time, and not by any of the prosecutors who had handled Flynn’s case up to that point.
The dismissal request has been highly controversial. Former prosecutors say it smacked of favoritism toward an ally of Trump, and some have specifically accused Attorney General William Barr of manipulating the justice system to help the president. Trump has frequently criticized the case against Flynn.
Except, they don't.
Your reply appears to be an appropriate place to post this. It doesn’t have a name so can’t be verified but I found it very interesting and wouldn’t hesitate to believe it! Sidney Powell trusted this man after having several cases before him over the years but I’m sure that’s changed now..It’s gotten so bad, there isn’t anyone we can trust in DC or on the bench anymore!
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1261480070683688967.html
You had to go to the end of the article to find anything remotely supporting your argument.
when I see the words emmett sullivan judge, i think of emmett kelly the clown...
> If he still seeks to impose his wrongful methods, then impeachment and removal is the remedy - not sanctions.
That imho may be a remedy for injury from wrongful judiciary decisions to the public at large, but it does not seem like a remedy for any specific defendant in any specific case.
Like it. Let's see how fast this goes viral.
United States v. Fokker Servs. B.V., 818 F.3d 733, 742 (D.C. Cir. 2016) is the controlling case in the DC circuit. The DC COA held: “[T]he `leave of court’ authority gives no power to a district court to deny a prosecutor's Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss charges based on a disagreement with the prosecution's exercise of charging authority.”
I like lawyer Leslie McAdoo Gordon’s (@McAdooGordon) interpretation of the court order, which is citing their definitive Fokker case:
Her tweet:
Basically. It’s saying:
“Here’s the standard (Fokker); Why isn’t that the end of it?”
More crudely it would be:
“Did you read this case? What are we missing?”
Super crude:
“We meant what we said in Fokker. Wtf are you doing?”
Take your pick.
p
That’s the core issue right there. We have a POTUS who does not have the support of his own party establishment and sometimes that makes for UGLY politics.
SteveH -
We may be saying the same thing. A single wrong decision isn’t grounds. But, the systematic refusal to follow the law and refuse to obey his superiors, will do the job.
3% of 1% = 0.0003 or 0.03% or 3 in 10,000 are successful.
If you’re getting 3 successes in 8 requests, I could use help with my lottery play :)
Has anybody noticed how all the major media Networks including Fox are ignoring this?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/federal-appeals-court-judge-flynn-case-dismiss
...Justice Department officials said they concluded that Flynn’s interview by the FBI was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”
The DOJ requested Sullivan dismiss the case, but he announced that he would permit outside parties to weigh in and appointed Judge John Gleeson to argue against the DOJ’s position.
In their emergency petition, Flynn’s attorneys said Sullivan “has no authority to adopt the role of prosecutor or change the issues in the case.”
“This is an umpire who has decided to steal public attention from the players and focus it on himself,” the lawyers wrote. “He wants to pitch, bat, run bases and play shortstop. In truth, he is way out in left field.”
And see #55 too.
I wish it were that easy; I heard Gerry Spence once asked if it was true he’d never lost a capital murderer case. He said yes. A young lawyer asked him why he was so successful - he said it is all in the selection of the case. This was immediately after he declined to represent OJ Simpson. As for my requests for Mandamus, it was only the times that I thought I could prevail. It helps if the conduct by the court is egregious. I think Sullivan will find a way to get out of the briar patch he created. In reality, it may be best for him to just walk away and not respond. Then dismiss the case. Or, order thta the case be transferred to another District Judge. He will be burned severely if he tries to stay in and proceed.
I didn’t need to notice it. I just beamed it into my expectations memory. IOW it was a foregone conclusion.
But Laura, Hannitus, Tuckus, and especially LOU DOBBS will blast it into viewer’s homes.
And I expect a MOAB coming from POTUS’s twitter fingers to land with it soon.
I"m no lawyer, but here is my concern.
What happens if all parties involved know that the judge is playing a stalling game to drag this out to the election?
Doesn't Lt. General Flynn have a 6th amendment right to a speedy trial? There is nothing speedy about what this judge is doing while Flynn has been waiting for sentencing, and now a dismissal.
What about his 8th amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment? Doesn't this judge think that his delaying actions are cruel and unusual to Flynn, who's been living with this since 2017?
Shouldn't the appeals court order Sullivan to end this within the next 10 days, at this point, to protect Flynn's 6th and 8th amendment rights?
-PJ
> “I think Sullivan will find a way to get out of the briar patch he created.”
I can see how a legal practitioner would think that and I’ve experienced such attorneys myself. God bless you for those you helped.
But the forces that pull Sullivan’s strings are not bound by law, not in their universe.
Sullivan has a choice, delay the ruling or lose everything including his pulse. There’s too much at stake for persons in extreme power.
Read more here about Flynn, Erdogan, Gulen, Hillary:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3847244/posts?page=12#12
http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3847244/posts?page=30#30
WikiLeaks, Hillary-Gulen Intimate Ties & How Clintons Gave Birth to Mullah Gulen’s Terrorist Network
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=tctl8FNasFo&feature=emb_logo
You have an odd situation here because if the circuit court rules in favor of Flynn, who can appeal that decision en banc or to the Supreme Court? The judge?
The circuit court judges must be troubled by his behavior. He had the option of simply denying the government request, sentencing Flynn, and allowing Flynn or the Justice department to appeal. Setting up this weird process with another judge coming into court to argue against the Department of Justice was really outrageous.
Now the weird thing is that judge Sullivan has to write a brief in support of his own actions. I have no experience with mandamus to a circuit court. Is that normal?
Also, I was wondering, could they have cited the Fokker case for the premise that the district court judge gets an opportunity to respond? Otherwise, the circuit court is sending him a clear message.
I can’t imagine that judge Sullivan really wants to produce a brief which supports the orders he issued in this case. What’s he going to say? I don’t like what the government did?
There is some support for the idea that a defendant withdrawing his guilty plea may have committed perjury, although it’s usually acknowledged that pursuing perjury in that case would be a miscarriage of Justice.
Also, unless I’m mistaken the matter before judge Sullivan is not Flynn’s previously denied effort to withdraw his guilty play. The matter before the judge was the government motion to dismiss charges. Therefore, asking someone to come in and argue that Flynn committed perjury seems like persecution of the defendant.
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