blackjack21 wrote:Flynn's plea agreement was about making false statements to the FBI. They were using the latter matter to charge him and his son. Flynn took the plea to protect his son.
Plea agreements generally do reduce charges. Flynn's son was very lucky. Given the severity of the charges Flynn faced, He mast have provided some very juicy info to Mueller to get that sweet a deal. Time will tell.
Prosecutors are always political operatives. They operate in a political branch of government.
No. There are no political crimes in the USA. There are "Criminal" statutes that apply regardless of a person's politics. You're free to disagree with that only because it's true. The fact that this investigation continues illustrates how ineffectual politics are in controlling the Dept. of Justice. Trump hates it, he'd lock up Hillary, Comey, McCabe, and at least half a dozen others if he were allowed to. But American law will not allow political prosecutions.
Now, the defense is accusing Mueller of withholding evidence. He still has time to provide it, but time runs fairly quickly with respect to speedy trials.
Yeah he has lots of time to provide it, the next hearing is scheduled for June 15. I had to look it up for details, not sure how deep your info is? It seems Mueller's investigation accessed HUGE amounts of social media (in Russian).
As I understand it, Mueller has given the defense what he intends to
USE as evidence. The rest of the data is extraneous and will not be used at trial, but the defense wants it anyway (a legal maneuver). Mueller will provide the raw data. At that time you can expect the "speedy trial" motion to be withdrawn and the defense to ask for an extensive continuance (another legal maneuver) to "evaluate" this huge trove of raw data (2 terabytes, the equivalent of 34,000 hours of digital music.)
They are already in court. They entered a plea voluntarily without proper service, and Mueller tried to prevent them from entering the plea.
Obviously the defendant was aware of the filing, which is the primary objective of service. So the defense claim of inadequacy of service should be VERY interesting.
As for disputing the defensive plea? Mueller's team asked for a delay in the initial hearing due to the issue of service and defense demands for discovery well in advance of court procedure. The issue of service may take precedence and complicates a pleading. I can't find anything confirming or explaining any objection by Mueller to the defense plea, all I see is that he asked for a postponement to allow his team to address the issues raised by the defense, pretty standard stuff.
The defense is working the PR angle here for all it's worth, the court is indulging them. Don't expect this to last. In fact, it may disadvantage the defense if they do in fact change their tune and start trying to drag things out.
All of the elements of the crime must be proved, and apparently the defendants were charged without all of the elements present due to a failure to outline all of the elements in the jury instruction.
That's
GRAND JURY instructions. Which, I think, are considered secret. The
GRAND JURY does not determine guilt or innocence, there isn't even any defense presented. The grand jury simply decides to indict or not to indict. This is just another defensive legal maneuver to tie up Mueller's team.
it doesn't look that great for Mueller.
On the contrary, it looks like desperation on the part of the defense. Mueller has a
STRONG team and all the $$$ and assistance he wants. It's all much ado about nothing.
Zam