It doesn’t get much swampier than this.
After the Department of Justice dropped all charges against former national security adviser General Michael Flynn, the judge presiding over the case’s conclusion has apparently decided to take it upon himself to further inconvenience the highly decorated military man.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan will consider whether to find former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in criminal contempt of court after the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved last week to drop its prosecution of Flynn for lying to the FBI.
Sullivan issued an order Wednesday appointing retired judge John Gleeson as amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) to argue against the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, as well as to advise the court on whether it should begin contempt proceedings.
The news comes just days after Flynn’s charges were dropped by the DOJ, who were compelled to do so after a slew of handwritten notes were declassified from deep within the FBI. In the notes were references to a plan to trick Flynn into lying to interviewing agents, with Flynn eventually being charged with precisely that crime.
The former Trump national security adviser was also a keystone of the Obama administration’s attempts to conjure a connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and Flynn’s recent legal exoneration has cast a pall of doubt over the entire RussiaGate investigation.
Here’s where it gets weird:
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provide that a judge “may summarily punish a person who commits criminal contempt in its presence if the judge saw or heard the contemptuous conduct and so certifies.” However, it would be very unusual for a judge to find a defendant in contempt merely for exercising his right to change a prior guilty plea.
In withdrawing its case against Flynn, the DOJ did not say Flynn had not lied, but that his lies were not “material” because Flynn was not actually being investigated by the FBI for any offense at the time he made false statements to FBI agents.
The continued meddling by Sullivan will only serve to bolster conspiracy theorists’ belief that General Flynn is deeply connected to the QAnon phenomenon, and that this is nothing more than a Deep State plot to keep him from walking free.
