The ‘Shoe On The Other Foot’ test is a helpful tool to see if you are being fair or being partisan. This test is being badly failed by Media and Politicians right now.
Before the event became hijacked by political partisanship, there was almost unanimous agreement that George Floyd was a tragic victim of a lethal abuse of authority. We ALL wanted an investigation and — if the facts aligned with what common sense told us — charges laid against the men responsible.
The political left and the political left — for a rare, shining moment — stood in agreement on an issue of importance. Someone acting in the name of the state had acted unjustly, with either indifference or intentional malice, trampling the rights of a citizen in a way that caused real harm.
The abuse of authority and the indifferent trampling of a citizen’s rights are what brought us together to decry this injustice. And we all SHOULD have come together for such an incident.
We can’t help but notice another the deafening silence in which we have NOT come together over an obvious trampling of a citizen’s constitutional rights.
In the Flynn case, Agents of the State are perpetuating another injustice. True, this one has stopped short of killing its victim, but it has denied him his rights time and again in malicious effort to force a guilty plea on a man they knew to be innocent.
They destroyed his reputation. Stole his livelihood. Brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. Threatened to investigate his children. Worst of all, in their effort to destroy an innocent man, in the process of trying to prosecute him for a lie that even investigators themselves had agreed he had never told. In their zeal to take him down, they themselves lied and schemed and violated his Constitutional rights.
His trial in the court of public opinion began when someone committed a felony against him by publicly leaking information from Intelligence surveillance of a private phone call. This phone call became the focus of the investigation against him.
- We now know that Flynn was explicitly discussed in an Oval Office meeting in January 2017 by the very highest levels of the Executive Branch… including Obama and Biden.
- We now know that information that would have exonerated Flynn and substantiated his claim of innocence were explicitly suppressed, contrary to law.
- We now know that paperwork from the interview indicates an explicit desire of FBI Agents to either trip Flynn up in a lie, or get him fired even BEFORE the interview.
- We now know that Comey admitted deliberately tricking Flynn into letting his guard down and NOT exercising his right to legal Counsel.
- We now know that Comey took advantage of the chaos of transition to bypass the standard White House procedure for such interactions.
The DOJ has reviewed this case and acknowledged that for these reasons among many others, that they were withdrawing the charges against him.
That should have been the end of it. Right?
The defendant retracted his plea, claiming it was given under duress. The plaintiff retracted the charges, claiming they did not meet legitimate prosecutorial standards. With no conflict left to resolve, the only thing left was for the defendant to go free, right?
Wrong. With almost any OTHER judge, yes. But not this one.
The judge, who had revealed his own biases when he leveled the word ‘traitor’ at Flynn during the trial — something this decorated General was never once accused of being — only to retract those words hours later when his name had been defamed around the planet didn’t let it go.
He had his knuckles rapped by a higher court and blew off their instruction to give a ruling on the request for dismissal by June 1. Instead, he put on the prosecutor hat and invited a former judge who had recently written an op-ed critical of Flynn in a national paper to argue (as he had in the oped) that Flynn had perjured himself in the courtroom by giving a false guilty plea (which was given under duress).
Said one legal professor:
If Sullivan’s invitation for third parties to argue in a criminal case is unnerving, his suggestion that he might substitute a perjury charge is positively terrifying. Sullivan has compounded this judicial overreach by asking Gleeson to explore the issue, despite his public criticism of the administration’s handling of the Flynn case.
Under Sullivan’s theory, any time a defendant seeks such a dismissal (even with the support of the prosecutors) he could face a judicially mandated perjury charge. Faced with evidence of prosecutorial wrongdoing (which often arises after a trial), defense counsel (like myself) would have to warn clients that the court might just swap one crime for another.
The chilling implications of such a theory are being brushed aside by those eager to see Sullivan mete out his own form of justice. However, such an unsustainable decision would quickly careen out of control.
…If Flynn is convicted, Sullivan will have to order the Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate someone who was convicted by judicial design.
…Using the flag in the courtroom as a prop, Sullivan incorrectly accused Flynn of being “an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser to the president of the United States. Arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out.” He then questioned whether Flynn should have been charged with treason.
Flynn faced a relatively minor single count of false statements with the likelihood of no jail time — but Sullivan was suggesting that he could have been charged with treason, subject to the death penalty. —Jonathan Turley
In Conclusion…
Every American citizen ought to be outraged that the State abused its power in the wrongful death of Mr. George Floyd.
If we are truly committed to the notion of justice, every American citizen should be similarly outraged that, for what appear to be political reasons, a decorated military officer was maliciously prosecuted by the State to the point of financial and professional ruination even when he was believed, by the very people who were investigating him, to have committed no offense.
We want justice invoked for those who have maliciously wronged George Floyd.
We also want justice invoked for those who have maliciously wronged General Flynn.
As Rev. Dr. MLK told us:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
—”Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963
