General Flynn Withdraws Plea, Rolls the Dice on Justice

Jan. 16, 2020 (EIRNS)—In a filing in Washington D.C.’s U.S. District Court on Jan. 14, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn withdrew his guilty plea and sought an adjournment of further proceedings. Sentencing had been set before Judge Emmett Sullivan on Jan. 28. Flynn had been President Donald Trump’s first National Security Adviser, and was earlier director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, until he was fired by Obama in 2014 for being a major obstacle to the kinds of illegal programs the Obama Administration had been running since the beginning.

Flynn’s counsel, Sidney Powell, states that the United States breached Flynn’s November 2017 plea agreement, when it renounced its sentencing recommendation of no jail time, and recommended a jail sentence for Flynn in its Jan. 7th Sentencing Memorandum. The Justice Department claimed that Flynn failed to cooperate in the related prosecution of Flynn’s former business partner, Bijan Rafiekian and obstructed that case. The DOJ lawyers also hammered Flynn’s lawyer Powell, claiming that she had foisted unfounded conspiracy theories on the public and the court, and that her declarations of Flynn’s innocence directly undermined Flynn’s previous acceptance of responsibility for his crimes.

While Rafiekian was convicted by a jury in the Eastern District of Virginia for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and related lobbying and false statement provisions, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga threw out the Rafiekian case because of insufficient evidence, post-trial. According to Powell’s brief, prosecutors had demanded that Flynn lie in the Rafiekian case in order to support their otherwise untenable prosecutorial theory. Mid-trial, prosecutors suddenly decided not to call Flynn as a witness against his former business partner, and claimed, out of the blue, that Flynn was a co-conspirator.

This stunning mid-trial reversal in the Virginia trial was squarely aimed at further inflaming Judge Sullivan. Sullivan had previously called Flynn a traitor, in an unhinged rant at Flynn’s initial sentencing hearing in his court, and postponed sentencing, making it dependent on Flynn’s further cooperation in the Rafiekian case. That also shocked Judge Trenga, the trial judge in the Rafiekian case, with many attributing Trenga’s dismissal of the Rafiekian case to his perception of the government’s ugly and vindictive conduct with respect to Flynn.

Attorney Powell, in her brief, argues that the Justice Department team has engaged in a vindictive and retaliatory course of action ever since she began representing Flynn and exposing the illegalities involved in the frameup of General Flynn, begun in the Obama Administration, continued by the legal assassins on Robert Mueller’s team, and continued, to date, by Mueller’s still extant team of prosecutors. Judge Sullivan dismissed Flynn’s claims of government misconduct in a 92-page decision on Dec. 16th, even going so far as to accuse Powell of plagiarism.