Trump... I just can't.

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Whatever happened to all those manufacturing jobs Trump promised to bring back to the US? Even before this epidemic, manufacturing in the US was officially in recession.
All it took was a pandemic if it happens. Although Trump will still take credit I'm sure.
 

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
Barr pulling out the 'oh we accidentally photocopied a sticky note onto FBI documents and mistakenly used it to try to trick Americans into thinking it was actually exculpatory evidence'.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/justice-dept-acknowledges-fbi-notes-given-to-flynn-defense-contain-altered-dates/2020/10/07/00b66060-04ec-11eb-a2db-417cddf4816a_story.htmlScreen Shot 2020-10-08 at 11.28.26 AM.png

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it inadvertently altered dates on copies of notes from two former senior FBI officials that were turned over to Michael Flynn’s defense team and filed to the court as potentially exculpatory evidence.

The dates were added to notes of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and former FBI agent Peter Strzok and should have been removed before the documents were scanned by FBI headquarters, the Justice Department told a judge weighing its request to dismiss the former Trump national security adviser’s prosecution. McCabe and Strzok were key figures investigating possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016.

An attorney for Strzok last week wrote the court saying that a copy of his notes filed by Flynn’s defense added at least two dates that he did not write, and at least one suggested a White House meeting happened earlier than it did. An attorney for McCabe similarly wrote the court Friday that an erroneous, added date seemed to suggest he briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about the Russia investigation on May 10, 2017, which did not happen.

At a hearing last week on the Justice Department’s motion, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called the claim by Strzok “unsettling,” and ordered prosecutors to certify under oath by Wednesdaywhether submitted materials “were true and accurate.” Sullivan has said he would issue a written opinion on whether to dismiss Flynn’s case “with dispatch.”

As judge weighs dismissal, Michael Flynn’s lawyer says she asked Trump not to pardon him

Responding Wednesday, prosecutors disclosed that in Strzok’s notes, dates were added by FBI agents participating in a review of Flynn’s case that Attorney General William P. Barr assigned in January to U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen of St. Louis.

The department said it was unclear who added a date to McCabe’s notes.

“The government has learned that, during the review of the Strzok notes, FBI agents assigned to the EDMO [Jensen] review placed a single yellow sticky note on each page of the Strzok notes with estimated dates (the notes themselves are undated),” the department said.

“Those two sticky notes were inadvertently not removed when the notes were scanned by FBI Headquarters, before they were forwarded” to U.S. prosecutors in Washington to produce to Flynn, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jocelyn Ballantine of Washington, D.C., told the court.

Similarly, the government learned “at some point during the review of the McCabe notes, someone placed a blue ‘flag’ with clear adhesive to the McCabe notes with an estimated date,” Ballantine wrote. “Again, the flag was inadvertently not removed when the notes were scanned by FBI Headquarters, before they were forwarded to our office for production.”

A spokeswoman for McCabe declined to comment.

In a statement, Aitan Goelman, Strzok’s lawyer, questioned the government’s claim that the additions were unintentional.

“The government claims that the undisclosed alterations were a result of sloppiness and not a deliberate attempt to mislead,” Goelman said. “It would be easier to give the government the benefit of the doubt if the alterations didn’t fit a false narrative pushed by the President, or if they weren’t made by a team specifically chosen by the Attorney General to provide political aid to President Trump, or if Bill Barr hadn’t already demonstrated his willingness to cast aside the Department of Justice’s tradition of neutrality in an attempt to help President Trump.”

In an Oct. 2 letter to the court that was docketed Wednesday, McCabe lawyers Michael Bromwich and Rachel Peck wrote, “The date ‘5/10/17’ that appears on Exhibit B is not in Mr. McCabe’s handwriting and he did not enter the date that now appears there.”

A battle is looming over a judge’s power and an attorney general’s motives in the case of Trump’s former national security adviser

Separately Wednesday, Flynn’s defense demanded that Sullivan remove himself from the case, accusing him of “stunning” and “abject bias” against the defendant. Flynn attorney Sidney Powell has made similar public allegations for several months, including unsuccessfully to an appeals court, but the filing was her first formal written request to Sullivan for recusal.

In the 40-page filing, Powell alleged that Sullivan created at least an appearance of bias by not ordering the government earlier to turn over more potentially exculpatory evidence and inviting outside counsel to oppose the government motion to dismiss his prosecution, among other actions. She said Sullivan telling Flynn at one point in the case, “You sold your country out,” was a sign of the judge’s bias.

She argued Sullivan’s recusal also became mandatory when he effectively became a party to the case, successfully persuading a full appeals court Aug. 31 to overturn a split panel decision initially granting Flynn’s request for an immediate dismissal.

“When this judge used retained counsel at taxpayer expense to seek rehearing en banc and prolong a prosecution the Department of Justice dropped, he abandoned any semblance of the neutrality required of a federal judge,” Powell argued. “This court has assumed the mantle of a party, affirmatively litigating and seeking to prosecute the defendant before him.”

Flynn, 61, awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in December 2017 to lying about his pre-inauguration discussions with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The former Trump foreign policy adviser asked Moscow to wait until Trump took office to respond to American sanctions imposed after Russia intervened to support Trump in the 2016 U.S. election.

At Barr’s direction, the Justice Department in May moved to dismiss the case, prosecuted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

Reversing its past arguments, the department said it had concluded after Jensen’s review of internal communications and other information that Flynn’s lies were immaterial to any underlying crime and stemmed from a flawed investigation by the FBI and prosecutors. Flynn has also claimed his innocence, alleging misconduct by prosecutors and his former defense team, saying he was coerced into pleading guilty.

At a Sept. 29 hearing, career prosecutor Kenneth C. Kohl, the No. 2 official in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., said what ultimately drove the department’s request to drop Flynn’s charge was a conclusion that “we just couldn’t prove” the case. Kohl cited the damaged credibility of Strzok and McCabe.

“The I.G. knocked out all of our witnesses in this case,” Kohl said.

Who is Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge standing between Flynn and exoneration, punishment or a pardon?

Strzok was removed from the Mueller probe and eventually fired by the FBI for sending personal texts critical of Trump, although the department’s inspector general found no evidence that political bias influenced investigative actions. Inspector General Michael Horowitz separately alleged that McCabe lied to investigators exploring a media disclosure, although prosecutors ultimately did not charge him.

Strzok and McCabe have separately sued the Justice Department, alleging they were ousted illegally in a political vendetta by the Trump administration encouraged by the president in a litany of public attacks.
 
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