Michael Flynn isn’t out of the woods — not by a long shot
To employ one of the favorite words of the child-raping, murdering cretin Donald Trump, this is just “incredible.” Despite Trump’s using it as a synonym for “wonderful” or “marvelous,” the word “incredible” actually means, of course, difficult or impossible to believe. And so, just as it’s both difficult or impossible to believe anything Trump says, it is also difficult or impossible to believe William Barr’s unabashedly banana republic move to drop the criminal case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn.
Flynn, you will recall, is the cretin who led a rally of Nazi nitwits in a full-throated “lock her up” chant directed against Hillary Clinton. Then it later developed that Flynn “forgot” to disclose that he was still a foreign agent working for Turkey when he took the job as National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. Furthermore, Flynn unlawfully promised the Russians he would personally see to it that Obama-era sanctions against them would be dropped if the Russians would help Trump get elected. Now, according to William Barr’s DOJ, none of that is true anymore because Flynn did his lying from the White House and the rule of law doesn’t apply there and Flynn is therefore free to go, despite the fact that 1) Flynn pled guilty to both counts orally and 2) he also did it in writing.
Not so fast. Before Trump and his bloated, out-of-shape, junk food-binging fellow losers take a wheezing victory lap, there are a couple of problems with their premature celebration of victory and, wow, are those problems ever huge. I’ll tell you the lesser one first and save the larger one for last. The first problem is Judge Emmet Sullivan, the jurist overseeing Flynn’s case, can and probably will demand that the DOJ show cause for the dismissal of the Flynn case. They will have to put it in writing and, should Sullivan disagree with their brief, he can disallow it. That decision is pending.
The second problem for Flynn is the statute of limitations on his crimes runs out in 2022. That means the Department of Justice can refile the charges against Flynn any time it wants to. This is not an instance of double jeopardy: dropping the charges is not the same as acquittal. Consider for a moment what a DOJ headed up by, say, Attorney General Kamala Harris, would do with that tasty bit of information.
This is just one of the many delightful eventualities to contemplate when Trump loses in November. Not only will Flynn’s “victory” be snatched away from him, it will be snatched away after his having gone through three unquestionably distressing years of wondering if he’s going to prison in the first place, only to be told he won’t have to after all, only to then be told he will. Justice delayed is not always justice denied. I don’t know about you all, but I, for one, would love to see Michael Flynn’s face on the evening of November 3rd, 2020, when he finally realizes that, yes, he really is going to prison after all.
That is the kind of tasty justice I would like to see for the man who called for the imprisonment of an innocent woman. After all, what’s the point of having schadenfreude if you can’t use it? But we won’t have that and many other good things if Trump should get a second term. So we must unite and we must put away our temporary differences and we must vote with a single voice in November to rid ourselves, at last, of this plague called Donald Trump. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.