Advertisement

Judge Raises Suspicions With Appeals Court About DOJ Motives For Dropping Flynn Charges

Lawyers for a federal judge raised suspicions in a court filing Monday about the legitimacy of the motives behind the Justice Department’s move to drop perjury charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“It is unusual for a criminal defendant to claim innocence and move to withdraw his guilty plea after repeatedly swearing under oath that he committed the crime,” noted the brief filed with the Washington District appeals court on behalf of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who presided in the Flynn case. It is “unprecedented” for the DOJ to take action to dismiss a case years after two different federal judges accepted the plea, the brief added.

The “unusual developments in this case provide at least a plausible ‘reason to question’ the ‘bona fides’ of the government’s motion,” lawyers argued.

Sullivan should not be required to act as a “mere rubber stamp” for Attorney General William Barr’s strategy, and should be allowed to rule in the case to protect the “integrity of the judicial process,” the brief warned.

After Sullivan signaled last month that he would not rubber-stamp the DOJ move to drop the charges, Flynn’s attorneys asked the appeals court to order the judge to do so, and accused Sullivan of “bias.”

The Justice Department joined with Flynn in a separate filing later Monday asking the appeals court to immediately dismiss the case. It argued that the executive branch, not the judiciary, has the “power to decide when — and when not — to prosecute potential crimes” — even though it was the DOJ that initially prosecuted the case against Flynn. Judges don’t have the authority to “stand in the way of a dismissal the defendant does not oppose,” it argued.

The back-and-forth was the latest chapter in the Trump administration’s effort to sanitize Flynn’s actions before he was fired by Donald Trump three years ago after pleading guilty to lying to Vice President Mike...

Continue reading on HuffPost