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Mueller investigation

Jimmy Higgins said:
Patooka said:
poster said:
That's really fucked up. I realize many of you here don't want to hear that because you're still angry about the election and can't see straight, but seriously people, wake up and smell the stench. It's pretty bad from both sides!
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One of the things Trump will leave behind as his legacy will be what an utterly banal bullshit argument "From both sides" truly is. No, the Democrats are not this fucking bad and ethically bankrupt. I agree that they are not perfect, I just don't understand why you think that is the exact same thing.
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This disparity is called by many (only me), The Moore Coulter Fallacy.
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I know. If I remember correctly, the phrase was coined in this forum way back when this place was called Internet Infidels ;)
 
poster said:
Rhea said:
I thought entrapment was when you urge someone to commit a crime by pretending you aren’t law enforcement - by pretending you are an accomplice.

I don’t think it has anything to do with getting people to confess to a crime they committed of their own volition.
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You don't seem to understand. There was no crime to confess to until after he was interrogated.

It went something like this:

Interrogator: General Flynn, what times were the phone calls to so-n-so?
Flynn: 9am and 2;15pm
Interrogator: Wrong, they were 9:09am and 2:17pm. You are being charged for lying to the FBI​


That's the kind of shit they pull when they've got nothing.
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It is too bad for Flynn that he was represented by such an incompetent lawyer that he got bamboozled into pleading guilty. That's what you get for hiring an incompetent hack for legal representation rather than perusing internet discussion forums for advice.
 
poster said:
He did and said nothing illegal or inappropriate considering his position during the calls. That's why he was charged for lying.
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Then why did he plead guilty to lying?
If he did nothing illegal, and his 'lie' was just a memory mistake, why would he plead guilty?
Why plead guilty AS PART OF A DEAL?

You only make deals with guilty pleas for lesser sentences. If he's innocent, his lawyer is guilty of malpractice.
 
Keith&Co. said:
poster said:
That's the kind of shit they pull when they've got nothing.
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Says the legal eagle who doesn't understand how plea deals work, or what entrapment is.
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Has anyone else noticed how Russian troll-bot efforts have recently devolved into impotent, incoherent railings against the wind? It's like they figure that since Pizzagate sold so well, they can simply pull stuff out of their ass, and expect not only the mindless trumpsucking base to eat it up, but to have some influence on people with more than half a brain as well.
 
poster said:
I fully understand how serious obstruction of justice is. When Trump asked or suggested (or however he put it) to Comey to drop the collusion stuff, perhaps that's because Trump knew it was bogus and a waste of money. Now, that makes Trump a hypocrite because of the birther issue, however, the FBI and the rest of the justice department weren't investigating the birther issue.

I get it - make life for Trump and his administration hard, but the line should be drawn at civil rights which the intelligence agencies have been trampling on, and as is being revealed through all this, it looks as though it's been abused for quite some time, and very often by people in the Obama administration.

That's really fucked up. I realize many of you here don't want to hear that because you're still angry about the election and can't see straight, but seriously people, wake up and smell the stench. It's pretty bad from both sides!
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The election is over. get over it. There is only one side. The winning side. And that is the side that matters at all. You don't have any more excuses left! The OJ defense will not work here. A) Trump isn't black and B) no one is going to riot over some rich white criminal getting jailed for robbing the country.

I suppose you want to investigate George Washington for lying about chopping down a tree.. "other side" my ass.
 
Keith&Co. said:
poster said:
He did and said nothing illegal or inappropriate considering his position during the calls. That's why he was charged for lying.
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Then why did he plead guilty to lying?
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My understanding is that in technical legal terms inacuracies are considered lies - when the FBI has a hardon for someone, and because he is technically guilty of lying then a plea deal is better than taking your chances in court.

You have not answered the question as to why would he knowingly lie when he didn't do anything illegal. Perhaps we can speculate that he lied intentionally because he knew he hadn't acted in any criminal fashion and lying was his way of saying "fuck you"? Maybe he didn't know lying to the FBI in itself was illegal? Perhaps his initial interview was without his lawyer, thinking he didn't need an attorney since he hadn't done anything illegal?

And I'm someone who doesn't care for Michael Flynn as a person, Flynn being a war monger. But nobody should be denied their civil rights and be jailed for lying to a cop when they haden't transgressed any laws.
 
The most reasonable and plainly logical reason for a person to lie about meeting with another person, is that the meeting itself implicated him in illegal activities.

Poster keeps obfuscating the documented fact that he plead guilty to lying about meeting with a Russian spy AT ALL, and not about a few minute difference in the time of a call, or the exact date of something, or anything else floating around in the imagination of Trump sucker.

poster said:
My understanding is that...
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From where does your "understanding" come? By "understanding" perhaps you mean, "hope"? You got the word "entrapment" confused with "Incriminate"... "My understanding" is that you also aren't using "understanding" correctly either.
 
poster said:
Keith&Co. said:
poster said:
He did and said nothing illegal or inappropriate considering his position during the calls. That's why he was charged for lying.
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Then why did he plead guilty to lying?
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My understanding is that in technical legal terms inacuracies are considered lies -
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your understanding, huh? Got a citation for that? Because there is a difference in inaccuracies and actual intentional lies.

So either they had evidence he was lying, or they had evidence of worse crimes...
You have not answered the question as to why would he knowingly lie when he didn't do anything illegal.
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since i don't blindly accept your baseless assertion, i don't feel a need to join your self-serving speculation.
And none of your speculation fits the facts so far....
And I'm someone who doesn't care for Michael Flynn as a person, Flynn being a war monger. But nobody should be denied their civil rights and be jailed for lying to a cop when they haden't transgressed any laws.
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no rights have been denied.
No entrapment has occurred except in bizzaro world.
 
Sarpedon said:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/09/politics/michael-cohen-fbi/index.html

FBI raids Michael Cohen's office!
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Here is the original article that the CNN report referred to F.B.I. Raids Office of Trump's Longtime Lawyer Michael Cohen. The raid was conducted by the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York on a referral from the Mueller investigation. Some of the seized records may contain privileged communications between Trump and Cohen, so a special team of investigators have been assigned to process the evidence, presumably to cull out such records. I have a feeling that attorney-client privilege is going to be a serious issue in the aftermath of this raid, so it looks like they have strong evidence that Cohen committed a crime. Otherwise, they would not dare such a raid.
 
Keith&Co. said:
poster said:
My understanding is that in technical legal terms inacuracies are considered lies -
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your understanding, huh? Got a citation for that? Because there is a difference in inaccuracies and actual intentional lies.

So either they had evidence he was lying, or they had evidence of worse crimes...
You have not answered the question as to why would he knowingly lie when he didn't do anything illegal.
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since i don't blindly accept your baseless assertion, i don't feel a need to join your self-serving speculation.
And none of your speculation fits the facts so far....
And I'm someone who doesn't care for Michael Flynn as a person, Flynn being a war monger. But nobody should be denied their civil rights and be jailed for lying to a cop when they haden't transgressed any laws.
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no rights have been denied.
No entrapment has occurred except in bizzaro world.
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Since the 1930s, the statute used against Flynn has experienced a “creeping expansion.” As a result, it has become a powerful tool that criminalizes what someone says even in cases, like that of Scooter Libby, longtime aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney, when the government cannot prove any other wrongdoing.

Critics argue that 18 USC Section 1001 now has too broad a reach. They worry that it gives prosecutors what United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once called “extraordinary authority…to manufacture crimes.” Yet despite the expansive use of the false claims statute, American law sometimes has looked the other way when lies are told. Thus prosecutions for perjury have been quite rare and courts have generally been reluctant to enforce section 1001.

Moreover, they sometimes invoked a doctrine called the “exculpatory no” to excuse individuals who falsely denied guilt in response to an investigator’s question. In 1998, the Supreme Court put an end to this practice. As Justice Scalia explained at the time, “Certainly the investigation of wrongdoing is a proper governmental function; and since it is the very purpose of an investigation to uncover the truth, any falsehood relating to the subject of the investigation perverts that function.”

The harm of Flynn’s lies
I’d argue that in Flynn’s case, 18 USC Section 1001 was used correctly and to good effect. What Justice Scalia said in his 1998 opinion helps us identify the harm Flynn did. His lies indeed “perverted the function” of the FBI and impeded it from doing what it must do in a nation governed by the rule of law – prevent government officials and those seeking power from subverting our system of government.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant long ago noted that lies like Flynn’s threaten the foundations of organized society and “vitiate the source of law itself.” Never has Kant’s insight been more pertinent than it is in the United States today.
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I included the final two paragraphs so I wouldn't be accused of trying to push anything by anyone. The author, of course, has a right to his opinion. https://theconversation.com/should-lying-to-the-fbi-be-a-crime-88541

My assertions aren't baseless, if they were Flynn would have been charged with more than lying. He wasn't.

BTW, you started out fairly reasonable, so I thought you were worth conversing with, but you've become inconsiderate and insulting. Perhaps you're just defensive like some of the others here. If you continue in this manner, I'l take it to mean you'd rather not continue. Deal?
 
poster said:
... Flynn would have been charged with more than lying. He wasn't...
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YET. For all you know, there are further (and likely more serious) charges that can be filed against him (and probably his son) if anything he tells Mueller turns out to be untrue or incomplete. That's how those things work.
 
Elixir said:
poster said:
... Flynn would have been charged with more than lying. He wasn't...
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YET. For all you know, there are charges that can be filed against him (and probably his son) if anything he tells Mueller turns out to be untrue or incomplete. That's how those things work.
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Now you're speculating, and that's okay as long as it's you? We're discussing what has happened, not what might happen.
 
Elixir said:
poster said:
Now you're speculating
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Yup. So are you. It's okay for you to pronounce your speculations as fact?
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My speculations have been only what I proposed as scenarios of why Flynn might have lied and my simplistic example of how Flynn was charged. The facts are that he was charged with lying and nothing more. I called it entrapement while Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it “extraordinary authority…to manufacture crimes.” as noted in the article above. I'm happy to yield to Ginsburg's description.
 
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