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You can’t make this up. The shocking thing is that Americans voted for this ignorant nitwit.
Babylon Bee strikes again!
Margot Cleveland:
“…On Wednesday, the previously sealed Motion to Compel filed against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case was made public with only minor redactions. Just the day before, during a hearing before federal judge Emmet Sullivan, Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, had highlighted some of the evidence prosecutors withheld from her defense team. Yesterday’s filing expanded exponentially on the areas of evidence Powell seeks and lays bare Powell’s bigger plan moving forward: to expose the breadth and depth of SpyGate and how flaying Flynn lay at the heart of the soft coup attempt.
In her Motion to Compel, Powell catalogued 40 categories of evidence the government has refused to turn over. She seeks a court order requiring federal prosecutors to provide the withheld evidence under Brady and its progeny. Brady and its offshoots require prosecutors to disclose material exculpatory and impeachment evidence to the defense team. And, as Judge Sullivan made clear during Tuesday’s hearing, that duty exists even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty and even though he had agreed that the government would not be required to provide him with further evidence.
In another exchange, Powell stressed that recently disclosed evidence showed the government had concluded that Flynn was not a Russian or Turkish agent, and, in fact that Flynn had briefed the government before meeting with Turkish officials. That evidence was relevant to sentencing, Powell argued, because it negates prosecutors’ claim that they had foregone a FARA violation charge against Flynn. “That’s a good point,” Judge Sullivan concurred.
Powell will have a chance in her reply brief to detail how each piece of evidence sought is either exculpatory or serves as impeachment evidence. Here there’s an interesting twist: Powell seems poised to also argue that the 40 pieces of evidence requested are exculpatory (and thus Brady material), because they will show that “the entire prosecution should be dismissed for egregious government misconduct and long-time suppression of Brady material.”
The law is clear that, in extreme cases, a court can dismiss criminal charges based on egregious prosecutorial misconduct. What is unclear, however, is whether Brady requires the government to disclose evidence unrelated to the charged offense that points to broader prosecutorial or government misconduct. That is an issue of first impression that Judge Sullivan will have to address.
Some of the evidence Powell seeks is already presumed by many to exist, such as FISA applications pertaining to Flynn and the original 302 written shortly after FBI agents interviewed Flynn about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. But other evidence Powell identifies reveals that she has skinned all the snakes involved in SpyGate and knows exactly what went down. For instance, Powell requested “any information, including recordings or 302s, about Joseph Mifsud’s presence and involvement in engaging or reporting on Mr. Flynn and Mifsud’s presence at the Russia Today dinner in Moscow on December 17, 2015.”
It was at that dinner gathering that Flynn met Vladimir Putin. (A photograph capturing the two at that event has been used to further the Flynn-is-a-Russian-agent narrative.) Powell’s court filing is the first we are learning that Mifsud also attended that gathering—a strange coincidence given the FBI’s claim that it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign upon learning that Mifsud had informed the young Trump advisor George Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary.
Also intriguing is Powell’s request for: “All payments, notes, memos, correspondence, and instructions by and between the FBI, CIA, or DOD with Stefan Halper—going back as far as 2014—regarding Michael Flynn, Svetlana Lokhova, Mr. Richard Dearlove (of MI6), and Professor Christopher Andrew (connected with MI5) and Halper’s compensation through the DOD Office of Net Assessment as evidenced by the whistleblower complaint of Adam Lovinger, addressed in our brief.”
That is because the spying on Trump likely began with spying on Flynn, and involved not just the FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense, but their British counterparts, and dated back to Flynn’s time as President Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director. Then after Flynn joined Trump’s team, Halper and the British crew peddled a fake story that Flynn was having an intrigue with a Russian agent named Svetlana Lokhova.
For dragging her into their hit job on Flynn, Lokhova, who is a British citizen, sued Halper and the media outlets who published this tale for defamation. As I explained at the time she filed suit, Lokhova’s complaint suggests that the spying on the Trump campaign began in early 2016—not in late July after the FBI learned Mifsud fed Papadopoulos details about the Russians having dirt on Hillary.
Powell doesn’t explain any of this in her request, but the details she does include show she knows. The question is whether Judge Sullivan will allow her access to the evidence she needs to prove that Flynn was a victim of egregious government and prosecutorial misconduct—the scope of which we are still learning.
“…Rep.-elect Dan Bishop didn’t just overcome his Democrat opponent’s two-year head start and millions of dollars in out-of-state money. He also outperformed the GOP candidate’s 2018 efforts by 2 points — quite a different narrative from what the cable news pundits want voters to believe and great news for Republican prospects next year.
House Republicans are now 3-0 in special elections this cycle and, in all three races, the GOP nominee outperformed the 2018 result. In Pennsylvania’s 12th and North Carolina’s 3rd districts, Republicans even outperformed President Donald Trump’s 2016 numbers.
Our current GOP strategy is focused on two truths that spell disaster for Democratic prospects in 2020. First, House Democrats’ socialist agenda is wildly unpopular with voters and will be an anchor around the necks of their candidates in swing districts. Second, President Trump is the single most effective surrogate and turnout machine for the Republican Party.
Republicans came into the special election in North Carolina’s 9th with a unified message: Dan McCready, the Democratic nominee, was a political insider who supported Washington Democrats’ socialist agenda. This narrative was amplified by complementary messaging from the Bishop campaign, the National Republican Congressional Committee and conservative outside groups. This successful message discipline increased the effectiveness of the overall effort and provides a powerful roadmap for how Republicans can create compelling narratives in 2020 races…”
DAVID CATRON:
“…Last week the Democrats were touting the special election in North Carolina’s 9th District as the first major contest of the 2020 cycle, and the polls indicated that Democrat Dan McCready might win what should be a pretty safe GOP seat. By Wednesday morning, after Republican Dan Bishop had won, their focus had shifted and much commentary was devoted to his “thin margin of victory.” Little notice was taken of certain voting patterns that should frighten the Democrats. Specifically, McCready did far worse than expected in every county but one, and many of those counties are dominated by minority voters.
The most unnerving example, from the Democratic perspective, is rural Robeson County. The ethnic makeup of this county is as follows: Native American (38.6%), White (25.7%), Black (24%), Hispanic (8.52%), Two or More Races (2.15%), Asian (0.66%), Other (0.275%). On Tuesday the Democrat received a fraction of the votes he received in 2018, running for the same seat. Ryan Matsumoto of Inside Elections provides the gory details: “McCready won Robeson County by only 1.11 points, a MASSIVE decrease from his 15.31 point margin last November.” In 2012, Obama carried Robeson by 17 points.
This is a county of about 143,000, and 74 percent of these folks are clearly not the racist rednecks the Democrats would have us believe make up most of the Trump/GOP base. The shift away from McCready was the result of disenchantment among minority voters with the Democrat. Moreover, though Robeson was the most obvious, it was by no means the only ethnically diverse county whose voters “walked away.” Nearly 60 percent of Cumberland County’s approximately 333,000 residents are Black, Hispanic, or a member of some other minority group. McCready won it in 2018. Dan Bishop won Cumberland on Tuesday…”
Conrad Black:
“…This is the time for President Trump to deprive his enemies of the last weapon that could be employed against him that could cause him any harm: the largely false, but still troublesome, issue of his personality and routine behavior. Other lines of attack have come to naught: Collusion with Russia, accusations of racism provoking outbursts of mass murder (by uttering “racially charged statements,” in the inadvertently Orwellian words of CNN’s most witless talking head, Don Lemon), the verbal recession confected by the world-renowned economists of CNN and MSNBC, all of it has collapsed. Illegal border crossings are in sharp decline as the wall is steadily extended, and Mexico cooperates in arresting the flow of illegal migrants to the United States, all within the framework of a new free-trade agreement and the steady relocation of manufacturing designed for the U.S. market from China to Mexico (and other countries). The only arguments left to the puling and squabbling Democrats are ever more implausible lurches to the left and the lingering sense that Donald Trump, though not the extremist or the incompetent that many had declaimed and predicted, is just not suitable to be president.
It does the president no favors to pretend that there are not still a significant number of people who have an uneasy feeling that although his administration is in policy terms quite successful, and the president has faithfully tried to carry out most of what he promised in the raucous 2016 election campaign, he is yet too bombastic and evidently egocentric to maintain the dignity of his great office. This is a widely held view, even among many who support the president for his policy successes and the well-conceived initiatives that are still in the balance, especially trade and other negotiations with China, and the attempted revival of nuclear non-proliferation in respect of Iran and North Korea…
…But if the president wants to put the election away now, all he has to do is be a bit more gracious: more of a chief of state of a great people and of the world’s greatest power, and less of a backbiting, counter-sniping denizen of the nether political regions. To drain the swamp, he has to get clear of it. He has earned the ability to separate himself from the insalubrious stratum of an officeholder fighting for his life against historic calumnies and malfeasances. All but his most febrile enemies will concede his cunning, determination, and stamina, and, in a slightly rabble-rousing way, his panache. He has won every round in the toughest and highest league in the world. Now it’s time to show some class. Those who know him know he is capable of it. The office sought the man, and the moment seeks the conduct…”