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Federal court orders charges to be dismissed against Michael Flynn




By ALEX

After a litany of setbacks handed to the Trump Administration by the Supreme Court, some good news for has finally come. On Wednesday a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss a felony-false statement charge he gave during Robert Mueller's probe into Trump/Russian ties.

The decision was split 2-1 along ideological lines. The majority opinion written by Judge Neomi Rao - a Trump appointee- said that allowing the case to continue would intrude on the executive branch's prerogatives to control criminal prosecutions. She went further by saying that scheduling a hearing was improper under the circumstances because there was no reason to doubt the government's prosecution decisions during the case.

“Each of our three coequal branches should be encouraged to self-correct when it errs. If evidence comes to light calling into question the integrity or purpose of an underlying criminal investigation, the Executive Branch must have the authority to decide that further prosecution is not in the interest of justice,” the majority statement says.

Reporting from Politico points out that the decision leans heavily on "presumption of regularity," which means that prosecutorial decisions made by the executive branch are made in good faith.

If the decision is blocked by a new appeal than Flynn will be exonerated for his crime, despite pleading guilty to the charges twice.

This was something I had a feeling would happen, as noted in a previous article so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. What infuriates me more is that it's becoming more and more clear that the Trump administration is using its power to very clearly help political allies. 

Earlier this year we saw Roger Stone, one of Trump's longtime political advisers get a lighter sentence. It was a move that made four prosecutors handling the case resign from their posts at the DoJ. More recently, in a book published by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, we now know that Trump has planned to remove the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney George Berman to possibly help out a foreign dictator (though this right now is unverified and going off of Bolton's word is slippery.)

I'm not really sure I would believe that this decision from the DoJ was made in good faith. Flynn lied to investigators - he was not forced to do so - and plead guilty twice to breaking the Logan Act, which makes it a crime for private citizens to communicate with a foreign government without the legal authority.

This saga isn't over yet though and we'll have to see what happens next. It's hard for me to imagine Democrats or other legal authorities will lie over and let this happen - of course I have been wrong before.

What do you think though?


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