The way that Justice Department prosecutors are trying to stall for time, in the case to overturn General Michael Flynn’s ill advised guilty plea, shows a blatant attempt to lead the court down a dark and dangerous path through Deep State treachery. Instead of coming up with answers, government prosecutors are dragging their feet with one of the oldest tricks in the legal book, blame the delay on someone else.
Government stall blamed on former lawyers
Last week, DOJ prosecutors asked for a delay, moving the scheduled April 3 status hearing to April 24. The stall seems calculated specifically to give prosecutors more time to think of something to tell presiding Federal Judge Emmet T. Sullivan. They need to convince him to keep their case alive. Former National Security Advisor Flynn’s new legal team is asking for a dismissal on the grounds that the government is illegally hiding crucial evidence.
Instead of asking for more time to find the missing documents that the government is supposed to produce, they blame the delay on newly discovered evidence just turned over by Flynn’s former legal team. Apparently, it had been laying around unnoticed. The DOJ needs three extra weeks for their team of paralegals to read a box of records. It will take that long because they claim they need to use a magnifying glass to make it out.
According to the stall motion, the newly released documents “are voluminous, span numerous topics that arose during Covington’s 30-month representation of Mr. Flynn, and include many pages of sometimes difficult-to-decipher handwritten notes.” So, they insist, “the government needs additional time to digest this information and any additional information that Covington may provide.” They aren’t actually expecting more files, it just sounds good. It also saves them from telling the court that they still haven’t been able to locate crucial documents used to bring charges in the first place. Blame it all on the former lawyers, nobody liked them anyway.
“In order to allow the government adequate time to review the materials that have been produced and to request, receive, and review any follow-up information or documents, the government respectfully asks this Court to allow the government three additional weeks to provide a further status update and, if feasible, a proposed briefing schedule.” That last line means they hope to be able to buy even more time by “scheduling” things even further down the road once the three weeks runs out.
A dangerous path through Deep State darkness
“Meanwhile, the government still refuses to produce the original 302 and the DOJ memo of January 30, 2017 that exonerated him of any Russia issue,” Flynn’s new lawyer, Sidney Powell explains. The prosecution needs to stall because they “still refuse to dismiss the case.”
They keep trying, despite “the egregious government misconduct from the inception of this persecution,” which included “slipping an FBI Agent secretly into a presidential briefing in August 2016.” That incident happened before the election and was nothing but an attempt “to collect information on nominee Trump and General Flynn.”
“The country and Justice would be best served if the DOJ would take responsibility for these outrageous actions and the deliberate attempted destruction of an honorable man.” That will never happen and she knows it. It’s been well established that “the agents who interviewed him knew he was honest with them. They later altered the 302 until it was approved by Andrew McCabe.”
One interesting discrepancy to note is that the “voluminous” records, that the DOJ needs a three week stall to sift through, may not be as extensive as the Justice Department wants the court to believe. It looks like they’re seriously exaggerating. A note from the previous lawyers that came along with the missing materials paints a totally different picture.
“We have found emails and two pages of handwritten notes that were not previously transferred to successor counsel,” former lawyers Robert Kelner and Stephan P. Anthony wrote. “With respect to the emails, this appears to have resulted from errors in the process of collecting and searching electronic materials that were not contained in the working case file. The two pages of notes appear to have been inadvertently missed during the file transfer process.”