Fix the Flynn Frame-Up in the Courts

Mark Steyn:

I heard Kellyanne Conway being asked this morning about whether Trump should now pardon Flynn. No. It is for the court, as an act of judicial hygiene, to accept Flynn's withdrawal of his enforced guilty plea (made under threats by the feds to destroy the lives of various family members, too), quash the conviction as a miscarriage of justice, and invite the defense to lay before His Honor a wrongful prosecution suit.

If it requires a presidential pardon to bring garbage like this to an end, then we are all in trouble. Because if the Deep Staters can do it to Flynn, they can do it to anyone. It behooves Judge Emmett Sullivan to rule upon what has been a fraud upon the court from day one - and a fraud upon his court specifically: the documents made public this week were ordered to be handed over to Flynn's lawyers two years ago (February 2018) but were in fact only coughed up now because Jeff Jensen, a federal prosecutor in St Louis appointed by Attorney-General Bill Barr to look into the DoJ's conduct of the Flynn case, recently stumbled across them. A system in which prosecutorial misconduct requires a presidential pardon to undo it is not merely absurd but wicked: justice requires that Judge Sullivan extinguish the state's assault upon his own courthouse.

Oh, but the Comey-Mueller crowd will protest, Flynn confessed to the crime!

Well, sorta: He was prevailed upon to (in the sleazy euphemism) "settle". I hate settling - because, in the civil courts, it incentivizes the use of litigation as a form of blackmail; and, in the criminal courts, it leads to what happened in the Flynn case: a man confessing to a crime he does not honestly believe he has committed.

So why did he do it? Well, his then lawyers told him to. Why would they do that? Because the dirty rotten stinking corrupt federal justice system wins 99 per cent of its cases, 97 per cent without going to court. Kim Jong-Un's Attorney-General (assuming he has or needs one) can only marvel. A culture of judicial "settling" is by definition corrupt. ...

"Settling" is a very unsettling concept in the criminal context - in part because it destroys equality before the law: Someone who's got twenty bucks in his savings account can be forced to "settle" long before someone with twenty mil. In the case of this particular investigation, there was certainly foreign collusion in the 2016 election: Mrs Clinton colluded with an MI6 spook who colluded with his contacts in the Kremlin. But Hillary doesn't have to "settle" because she's never had anything to fear from the Strzoks and Comeys. For those less able to withstand the onslaught, the preponderance of American media see no injustice in the Flynn fit-up. For example, former federal prosecutor and CNN "legal analyst" Renato Mariotti:

This isn't unusual at all.

Michael Flynn was treated like thousands of other subjects who were interviewed by FBI agents.

If you don't like how Flynn was treated, change the rules for everyone. Because this is how it works.

...

Misremembering to the FBI should not be a crime - especially not on the basis of a politically motivated policeman's supposedly contemporaneous "notes", rather than an audio or video recording. Instead of a presidential pardon, why not repeal this vile pseudo-crime that mocks due process? I take it that, the GOP having lost the House, Congress will not enact a new Strzok Act, restoring the citizen's right to misremember to a corrupt police agency's goons, but why cannot Bill Barr suspend this "crime" pending an investigation into its misuse by prosecutors over recent years?

... There's a popular American vernacular expression to the effect that, if you're not on offense, you're on defense. After three years of seeing innocent persons traduced and ruined by a corrupt bureaucracy working to subvert the results of free and fair elections, is it too much to expect the enervated Republican Party and its flabby cheerleaders in Conservative Inc actually to rouse themselves and try a little offense?