Friday, December 01, 2017

WELL, THERE'S A FRESH TAKE ON MIKE FLYNN

Mike Flynn will plead guilty to lying to the FBI and the right is trying to find a way to cope. InfoWars has the hottest take:
WAPO CLAIMS FLYNN VIOLATED LOGAN ACT, DESPITE BEZOS ATTENDING BILDERBERG

The Washington Post is claiming former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn violated the Logan Act, an accusation they’ve never made against Bilderberg attendees, including WaPo owner Jeff Bezos who attended in 2013.

In fact, media bosses routinely attend the annual Bilderberg conference, including Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait who’s been at least 16 times, yet not only do mainstream reporters downplay Bilderberg, they also never consider that US attendees are likely violating the Logan Act just as they’re accusing Flynn of doing now....

Bezos is also a private citizen, and he has attended Bilderberg, where over 130 of the world’s top tech elites, bankers, politicians, ambassadors, royalty, media owners and intelligence agents – foreign and domestic – meet in secret for four days without an official record taken of the proceedings....

“The concentration of politicians and business leaders has meant the organization, founded at the Bilderberg Hotel near Arnhem in 1954, has faced accusations of secrecy,” reported the Business Insider in 2013 in a rare mainstream article on Bilderberg. “Meetings take place behind closed doors, with a ban on journalists.”

... In other words, Bezos met with foreign leaders to talk about foreign affairs, so if WaPo wants to start accusing people of violating the Logan Act, it should start with its owner.
Yeah, let's impeach Jeff Bezos!

Of course, Flynn isn't pleading guilty to violating the Logan Act, which has never sent anyone to jail, but whatever.

Now, here's a more mainstream take, which gives you the opportunity to see how right-wing ideas are transmitted. At National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes:
... when a prosecutor has a cooperator who was an accomplice in a major criminal scheme, the cooperator is made to plead guilty to the scheme. This is critical because it proves the existence of the scheme. In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.

That is not happening in Flynn’s situation. Instead, ... he is being permitted to plead guilty to a mere process crime. A breaking report from ABC News indicates that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians — initially to lay the groundwork for mutual efforts against ISIS in Syria. That, however, is exactly the sort of thing the incoming national-security adviser is supposed to do in a transition phase between administrations. If it were part of the basis for a “collusion” case arising out of Russia’s election meddling, then Flynn would not be pleading guilty to a process crime — he’d be pleading guilty to an espionage conspiracy.
This was retransmitted by Rush Limbaugh on the radio today:
If this were part of the basis for a collusion case arising out of Russia’s election meddling, then Flynn would not be pleading guilty to a process crime today.

He would be pleading to an espionage conspiracy. At the end of the day, this remains a process crime. He lied to FBI agents. And if there were collusion, if Flynn were promising to spill the beans on collusion, then he would not just be pleading guilty to a process crime.....

If you’re trying to entice Flynn to flip and really deliver the goods then you hit him as hard as you can and dangle the lesser penalty and charges down the road after he flips and cooperates.
And now it's showing up in a Breitbart comments section:



Next time you go on Facebook, you're right-wing uncle will be throwing around the phrase "just a process crime" as if he'd spent thirty years as a federal prosecutor.

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