This is a lawyer doing his job. It’s really bad when that’s the best they can come up with “I tweeted it, not him.”
A lawyer would make sure to use language that didn’t appear to incriminate. That’s their job.
This is nothing more than the tangerine turd scurrying around for an Ollie North. He knows the hounds are getting closer, he can hear them barking. They are apparently all the way to his SIL already.
I’ve no doubt that his lawyer penned that particular tweet; he must have been out of breath when he read the previous twee about firing Flynn for lying to VP Pence…and the FBI. D’OH!!!
And still, it will take an impeachment to remove him from office before 2020. I think liberals are getting their hopes up over this.
It doesn’t matter who crafted the language, Trump or his agent Tump posted it, and therefor adopted it as his own.
It does matter for criminal liability. If Trump were to deny any knowledge of Flynn lying to the FBI, and say that the tweet did not represent his views, I doubt that the tweet would be seen as incriminating him.
Understood.
But he needs to be impeached before he can be tried.
Is it that cut and dried in US lawyer-speak?
In Canada, we use “pleaded” and “pled” interchangeably. Out of curiousity, I once did a word search on the Supreme Court of Canada database of judgments, and it came up about 50/50 for the Court using “pleaded” and “pled”.
Kurt Eichenwald:
“White House blaming John Dowd for @Potus’s “I confess” tweet. I call BS. I know Dowd. Smart as a whip lawyer. He wouldn’t give a damn what twitter world thinks of Flynn charges. Thats pure Trump. WH blaming Dowd is transparent attempt 2 hide lie with attorney/client privilege.”
Understood too, the thing that is missed is that then it follows that the actual next step is indeed to throw all the congress Republican rascals out. The ones that will continue the 3 monkey’s act. Because now it will be clear who is responsible for not impeaching the peach.
Interchangeably used from all I’ve heard and read in my American legal experience over the past quarter-century, too. “Pled” has the obvious virtue of being shorter.
As a practical matter, I’m sure that’s how it’ll play out.
But is that a settled legal question? My understanding is that Jaworski didn’t indict Nixon because he didn’t want to deal with that (ETA: unresolved) question.
(I’m sure it helped that there was a reasonable chance that the House would impeach, and the Senate would convict, if the evidence that he’d obstructed justice was handed over to the House Judiciary Committee. That’s obviously not the case for the House before January 2019, nor for the Senate before January 2021, when Trump will hopefully be exiting anyway.)
Fake News. ABC has suspended Brian Ross over this:
That seems like a very off-the-subject thing to hope for. Especially since Trump didn’t need lots of campaign spending to win - the news networks gave him free publicity every day.
From National Review commentor and former Assistant US Attorney Andrew McCarthey:
Anyone with an informed opinion wants to comment?
I look forward to Preet Bharara’s take on this in his Stay Tuned podcast. He will post a Flynn episode sometime today.
Just glancing at the bits you quoted -
I can give you my informed opinion, as a person with a calendar, that Mueller has not been openly investigating collusion for over a year. Yes, there were previous FBI investigations, but we can’t assume that they are the same investigation.
I can also give you my informed opinion, as a person who spends a lot of time arguing on the internet, that Andrew McCarthy would have a hard time providing actual evidence for his assertion that pleading to a lesser charge just never happens in federal cases, because of some sentencing guidelines, and also for his conclusion that Flynn’s being charged with bullshit means that Mueller can’t possibly have anything else up his sleeve (including, for example, possible charges against Flynn Jr).
White House was told in Januarythat Flynn lied to FBI and should be fired. Wasn’t fired until weeks later and only after journalists found out.
McCarthy doesn’t say that they were the same investigation. But I think it’s safe to assume that Mueller didn’t start from scratch here, and he undoubtedly accessed whatever the FBI had on hand from their investigations.
I don’t know that McCarthy has any “actual evidence” of the sort you seem to be suggesting. But as noted, he is himself a former Assistant US Attorney, so he can be assumed to have some knowledge of these matters. Which is not to say he must be right, and it’s common for different knowledgeable people to disagree about things. But I was wondering whether and to what extent that is the case here.