Everyone hold your horses. The federal judge in the Gen. Mike Flynn case has responded to the Justice Department’s request to drop the charges against the General and the saga appears far from over.
Sullivan is clearly not happy. By setting a schedule for amicus curiae — friend of the court — briefs he’s putting off responding to DOJ’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case. In what would be a shocking twist, the judge can deny the motion.
— Megan Mineiro (@MMineiro_CNS) May 12, 2020
Per WAPO: The department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case is actually just a request — one that requires “leave of the court” before it is effective. The executive branch has unreviewable authority to decide whether to prosecute a case. But once it secures an indictment, the proceedings necessarily involve the judicial branch. And the law provides that the court — not the executive branch — decides whether an indictment may be dismissed. The responsible exercise of that authority is particularly important here, where a defendant’s plea of guilty has already been accepted. Government motions to dismiss at this stage are virtually unheard of.
The department now says it cannot prove its case. But Flynn had already admitted his guilt to lying to the FBI, and the court had accepted his plea. The purported reasons for the dismissal clash not only with the department’s previous arguments in Flynn’s case — where it assured the court of an important federal interest in punishing Flynn’s dishonesty, an interest it now dismisses as insubstantial — but also with arguments it has routinely made for years in similar cases not involving defendants close to the president. And all of this followed a similarly troubling reversal, also preceded by the withdrawal of career prosecutors, in the sentencing of Roger Stone.
This story is developing.
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