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April 30, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:32
General Flynn Versus the FBI! Lawyer Robert Barnes and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody. I'm here with a good friend, Robert Barnes.
He is a criminal tax lawyer, tax attorney, licensed to practice throughout the world, and I believe in other dimensions.
Based in Los Angeles, California, he specializes in criminal tax fraud law, but we're going to talk today about maybe the bombshell, maybe standard operating procedure revelations that came down yesterday regarding the FBI and General Flynn.
Now, I got listeners throughout the world.
I wonder if you could give people just a bit of background about, well, maybe more than a bit, about how this whole mess came to pass.
I mean, it's an extraordinary case at multiple levels, though ordinary at other levels.
I think disturbingly ordinary at other levels, as even some of the defenders of the government's actions have been strangely conceding of late.
So General Flynn was a key Trump advisor.
He had been a high-ranking military general.
He had actually been part of the Obama administration, but had a falling out over how the Obama administration was Handling issues related to Islamic terrorism around the world.
So he left to join the Trump campaign, was one of Trump's favorite surrogate speakers throughout 2016.
Then he was going to be the national security advisor for the president after his election.
And Flynn knew where all the white hats were within the national security establishment.
Within the sort of entire military, political, legal infrastructure that impacts national security, that has, you know, now some of the aspects of that has been called the deep state.
Basically, he knew who were the good guys within that apparatus to help implement the president's agenda.
Helped start to put together that team when he became targeted, unbeknownst to him, by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
First to get him fired, then to get him prosecuted.
And in that process to get him sort of not only removed and all of his allies effectively deterred from being able to help the president, but also to sort of smear the president by indirect innuendo through General Flynn.
And ultimately, he was criminally prosecuted or threatened with criminal prosecution.
And he agreed to a plea bargain initially, which he said that he would agree to plead guilty to making false representations to the FBI in exchange for no prosecution of any other charges that they could bring against him or members of his family.
Parts of that deal were kept off the books because they violate certain Department of Justice protocols You're not supposed to threaten someone's family as a condition of a plea, for example.
He was going forward with that and then the judge raised some questions.
Judge Sullivan, famous judge in the District of Columbia who previously has been critical of the government covering up misconduct.
For example, he presided over the criminal prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens that ended up being a bogus prosecution after an FBI whistleblower exposed all the corruption that took place in that case by the government.
After that, Judge Sullivan has been big about making sure discovery obligations are met.
Judge Sullivan had some questions about what was transpiring.
That led General Flynn to want to reconsider his legal counsel.
He did. He substituted his counsel with Sidney Powell, a former federal appellate prosecutor, but not a federal trial prosecutor, who has been very critical over the past decade of discovery abuses in federal criminal cases, including writing a book called License to Lie.
She took over. She believed there was major misconduct at multiple levels.
And that led us to yesterday.
Well, so that's when it dropped and there are the handwritten notes and a variety of other documents.
When you were looking through them, what made your spider sense tingle the most, if anything?
Well, to me, you know, doing a lot of federal criminal cases, you know, civil rights and constitutional law and other areas where you get into this kind of misconduct.
In federal criminal cases is where you really see the scope and scale and severity of government misconduct, and you're always looking for proof and evidence of it.
And usually it's hard to come by.
Usually you sort of know it's there by inference.
You know it's there by how the case was prosecuted.
You know it was there by why the case was prosecuted.
So in political cases in particular, cases of a political tinge or political motivation, you often find the government doing bad things.
I would say more than half of my tax cases.
The IRS has done something bad.
It's just the mixture of the government, unfortunately, in these kind of criminal cases.
And they're often targeting people to be sacrificial lambs for some ancillary ulterior purpose.
There's a lack of respect for human rights and individual rights by the people with the power in these kind of criminal prosecutions.
So in this context, what Sidney Powell was looking for was proof of what General Flynn was telling her.
And what General Flynn was telling her, by what we know now publicly, Is that he didn't do anything wrong.
He didn't believe he did anything wrong.
That he got ambushed in the interview process.
Didn't know what was happening.
Had no motivation or incentive to make any false statements.
That he hadn't done anything wrong in his public activities on behalf of The Turkish or other governments that he had had the law firm that defended him in the criminal case was the law firm that was actually representing him throughout that process.
And so from all he knew, everything was fine, but they were threatening him with such wide scale microscopic, macroscopic criminal power investigations against him and his entire family, including his son, who had just recently had a grandson.
That he felt like he was in a position where he had no choice but to capitulate based on the advice he was given by his counsel.
He started to suspect that his counsel had given him false advice, that his counsel, a prominent corporate defense firm in D.C., where Eric Holder, amongst others, had betrayed him for their own political and professional and personal interests, including maybe mistakes they had made during the process of representing him in a regulatory capacity prior to the criminal case developing.
And that the government had, if she dug in, that there would be proof of it somewhere.
And so she believed there would be.
So she began demanding all of the discovery.
And the obligation of the United States government in criminal cases here in the States is to provide what's called exculpatory information.
A range of cases, but it starts with Brady versus the United States.
And from that derives an obligation that if the government has any knowledge, any information, anything in their file that could be helpful to the defense, it doesn't just have to be helpful at trial.
It can be helpful at sentencing.
It can be helpful in plea negotiations.
Just something that if you were a defense lawyer, you looked at it, or if you were a defendant, you would say, I'd like to have that information.
They have an obligation to turn it over Immediately as soon as they had that information.
So what Sidney Powell, Flynn's counsel did, was demand give me all the helpful information because I don't believe I have it all.
And she demanded the former counsel, the Covington firm, provide all of their files.
Well, what they gave back was only partial, and they denied a bunch of things were there.
Even the court ultimately took potshots at Sidney Powell, somehow thinking that legal pleadings can be plagiarism, which is nuts.
That's the case. I got a lot of plagiarism cases against a lot of lawyers in America.
They borrow from me repeatedly.
That's fine. So that was what she was going through.
And then finally, the dam broke.
And there's some that attribute this to Attorney General Barr signing independent counsel to review the file.
But whatever happened, things happened at the same time.
Suddenly, the Covington law firm discovered, golly gee, they had just messed up the search.
And the search actually showed there was thousands of more documents and emails than they had turned over to their own former client.
In the States, you have an obligation to give your file, your client file, particularly in a criminal case, to your client.
Even if you have a fetus beat with them, you can't withhold the file.
At the same time, maybe just coincidental, all of a sudden the United States Attorney's Office and the FBI discovered a wide range of exculpatory notes and documents that they had been withholding.
Now, what's unusual is, you know, there was an old rule by Earl Long, great governor of the great state of Louisiana, who once said, never in writing and always in cash.
He had a couple of rules for some troubles.
And as Scott Adams has been having fun with, this has got to be the dumbest set of internal notes ever taken by an FBI agent.
There's some people that think maybe it was a white hat FBI agent who was unsettled by what was happening, so he was recording it contemporaneously.
And there's some evidence to believe that, because Bill Priestap apparently is the author of these, and he's one guy who seemed to be uncomfortable with what the rest of the office was doing.
But what it showed was it confirmed everything that General Flynn had been saying.
That what happened was these notes, they go in and they take notes, they call them afterwards, and the notes say, okay, what's our goal here?
Is our goal to get truth?
Maybe truth doesn't matter.
Is our goal to get an admission?
Is our goal to trick him into lying?
Is our goal to get him fired?
Is our goal to try to prosecute him for some reason?
Try to get him to commit a crime?
This is the definition of entrapment in the United States.
Everyone thinks it's all from column A, in pursuit of truth, and nothing from any of the other columns.
Exactly. It's extraordinary because the only point of the FBI, if they're doing a criminal case, is they have to have probable cause that someone committed a crime before they start investigating.
What they're not supposed to do is the old Soviet tactic of show me the person and I'll find you the crime.
And definitely not supposed to do something where the person would not have otherwise committed the crime, but for the government setting them up to do so.
The most famous political example of that, of course, in D.C. is Marion Barry, where they entrapped him by they wanted to have him on tape getting doing crack cocaine.
And the reality was he kept saying, no, no, no.
They had his mistress set him up for it.
And the good mayor was only there to have an affair with his mistress.
He only did the crack cocaine because he just wanted to get going with his mistress.
And that was an example of entrapment.
This here was the same because what they did is they they went in.
They were counter espionage components of the FBI who are supposed to work with the national security adviser.
So Flynn had no reason to believe that they were there to investigate him.
They made it a very informal meeting.
They didn't need a lawyer. They're just there to follow up and work together moving forward with the new administration.
So let me just put you on hold for a second.
Here's some free legal advice time.
Robert, anytime the government says, I want to have a conversation with you and you don't need a lawyer, what should be your first phone call at that moment?
Yes, to a lawyer. Okay, just wanted to make sure that comes across to the audience really clearly.
Exactly. I always say that it's not the army.
You don't have to volunteer.
So the Fifth Amendment is there for a reason.
And it's the way, in my experience, the people that when you see crazy cases, it's because the person is so innocent that they're naive.
You're Bill Clintons.
They know not to talk when they're not supposed to talk.
And they're also much better at lying when it's time to lie.
Your innocent, naive person can get entrapped into, quote-unquote, lying solely because they're in a position where they assume everybody's looking for the truth.
And so they make a mistake.
They have a misrecollection.
They don't remember this piece.
They get induced into making a statement.
They think, okay, that's what that person says must be true.
In this particular case, it was always an absurd case because General Flynn knew they had the transcript of the conversation.
They knew they'd been recording it.
Well, this is with the Russian guy, right?
Exactly. He talked to the Russian ambassador because the Russians were upset at what Obama was doing on Obama's exit.
And Flynn was just saying, everybody keep their powder dry.
Let's wait until we get it.
That's it. Nothing problematic whatsoever.
And his point to them during the meeting was, well, you guys have the conversation, so you guys know what What happened?
And so, you know, whatever happened, I don't remember it, but, you know, what you guys are saying is the case, and that's the case.
The FBI agent who did the interview came back and said, wrote internal notes, that, in fact, he did not believe Flynn did anything wrong or made any material misrepresentation because Flynn had no motivation to do so.
He knew they had the actual tape.
That's why it was always a crazy case, that he was lying about something that they knew that they had the tape of.
Why would he do that?
There's no motivation to do that.
I'm sorry, I just wanted to point out that motivation is key for entrapment.
I mean, if the guy has no motive to lie, even if you catch him in a lie, it's really tough to prove that entrapment case if I understand it correctly.
Exactly, because entrapment's all about, would the person have a propensity to have committed a crime anyway, even if the entrapment didn't occur?
So that's the government's version.
The way the government can overcome an entrapment defense is they say, well, this guy definitely would have done it anyhow.
And so even though we may have tried to set it up, we may have tried to induce him to do it, we were just doing an undercover sting operation.
We weren't doing entrapment. The problem here was he had absolutely zero reason to lie, zero motivation to lie, zero incentive to lie, zero need to lie.
And they knew that. That's why they even say in their internal notes, hey, drop in there where you can You know, hey, you should never make false statements to the FBI, but do it really like, you know, light, you know, somewhere buried in there so that we can say later, hey, we warned him and he still went on a lot.
I mean, it was a trap of all traps.
Well, sorry, they don't have to remind you of your legal obligation to tell the truth.
It's not like the Miranda Wright situation, but if they fail to do so, it can weaken their case.
Is that right? Yes, because the idea is you want to make it less of an entrapment if you're the government by saying, hey, this is very important.
We want to make sure you understand the significance of this.
We don't want you to think this is just something casual and informal.
This is a very important FBI agent interview, and we need to have the whole truth and nothing.
But that's what it's there for.
It's there to overcome, in their minds, the entrapment they're actually doing.
And so what's extraordinary here is the feds do this a lot.
They do this routinely and repeatedly.
But the scale at which they did it here, and I was doing it to a general, doing it without any pretext of a criminal investigation, usually when the feds go AWOL, Or the law enforcement goes AWOL. It's because they have a mistaken understanding of someone's guilt.
And so they have a preconception of the person's guilt.
And so they see themselves as, okay, maybe I'm framing them, but I'm framing a guilty person, so it's okay.
That's the kind of logic that they employ.
And that's where they go awry.
Here, what was unique is they knew he wasn't guilty of anything.
This was just pure entrapment.
Your typical entrapment, they thought Mary and Barry really was using drugs.
Some of your terrorism entrapment cases where they get people who were not otherwise terrorists to commit to terrorist events, they think they really were going to do so otherwise.
They just happened to intervene on the minority report-style timeline early.
Here, they all knew.
It was like the guy hasn't done anything wrong at all.
We're not even investigating him for anything wrong.
And they had to sort of parallel construct and in retrospect what they did, and that's where they came up with the Logan Act.
Nobody's ever been prosecuted for the Logan Act.
Okay, this one makes no sense to me, even in the labyrinthian world of the FBI and Flynn.
So Logan Act, what, 1790, and it's basically about you can't represent yourself as a representative of the U.S. when dealing with a foreign power if you don't have authority.
It's been updated a couple of times since.
It's never been used to criminally prosecute a citizen.
And it seems to get waved around quite a bit.
And John Kerry seems to walk through it like Indiana Jones through spider webs and so on.
But help me understand that this is part of his job.
It's part of his job. It's like saying, hey, man, you can't represent yourself as a lawyer.
But I am a lawyer, you would say.
It's like, well, this is his job.
Right, exactly. So basically, it was originally designed where there was actual concern that someone could be in a position to look like they have authority in the young United States government that they did not have.
It's sort of like the emoluments clause that had somehow come back up, which was designed to prevent...
They were worried about people, like in the emoluments clause context, they were worried about diplomats going over and saying, oh, the king of France will make me a prince if I sell out my country.
You know, that kind of thing.
And it's of the same mindset that the Logan Act comes about.
They're worried about somebody saying, oh, I'm really the assistant secretary of state.
When they have no position of influence at all because the government's so young, the government's so new, and that's why it's something that has completely faded in time and has no meaning in the modern age and has never been used for a single criminal prosecution because there are major constitutional problems with the way the statute is written.
It was written to solve one issue, not written to address the issues that they were talking about now.
Way back when all this started happening, when I saw both the Logan Act being named and Sally Yates being involved, and I had personal professional experience with Sally Yates when she was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, where she did all kinds of crazy things and her agents did all kinds of crazy things.
I I mean, they were threatening senators if they investigated the case.
They went after people who became clients of mine, simply using racial biases, making all kinds of crazy false accusations against them, doctoring documents, hiding discovery, every insane thing you can imagine.
So once I saw she was involved, I suspected that this is what was happening to General Flynn.
But there wasn't the proof of it yet, and the biggest problems that turned out was that his counsel was compromised counsel.
So they used the Logan Act to say, okay, we weren't doing an entrapment of him.
We were investigating him for a Logan Act violation because we were worried that he was committing U.S. policy positions prior to having a formal U.S. position, even though he kind of did under the transition laws that exist.
Well, he was the incoming national security advisor.
Exactly. And not only that, he was part of the transition team.
And we actually have rules in place that allow transition team people to represent the United States in a range of capacities.
So aside from the fact that it wasn't even a technical Logan Act violation, the Logan Act has never been used as a criminal statute ever in the history of the United States.
And so as soon as I saw that, I knew this was a bogus case.
But that was sort of the, they needed a pretext to justify what they were doing because otherwise it's obvious entrapment.
And the reason why I believe that they were doing it, people like you, people like Mike Cernovich and others were pointing out at the time that Flynn was critical to Trump's ability to get his agenda through, particularly within the national security apparatus.
And taking out Flynn basically gutted Trump's ability to have his actual populist instincts reflected in actual policy.
That's why somehow we're still in Afghanistan.
That's how we're kind of out of Syria.
That's why every time we try to get out of someplace, these people drag them back in.
Whereas if Flynn was there, they wouldn't have been able to do that.
And I know that from personal professional experience because other people that Flynn was associated with, they waited until Flynn identified the other white hats, then they went after him.
And Mueller went after everybody connected to Flynn.
I'm talking about well-respected, well-regarded military and law enforcement officials throughout the government.
By taking out Flynn, they took out all the white hats that could be in positions of power to make Trump's agenda an actual functional reality.
It achieved that objective.
Also, Russiagate, Mueller, Ukrainegate, impeachment, all of that likely does not occur if Flynn is in positions of power.
Their ability to pull that off If Flynn is there, it's way less.
Definitely Ukrainegate and impeachment.
That just doesn't happen if Flynn is there.
Instead, guys like Vindman got into positions of power and influence in his brother.
Well, and I wonder just off the cuff whether someone like Jeff Sessions, because this occurred under Jeff Sessions, whether someone like Jeff Sessions said, whoa, I think it might be time to recuse myself because seeking a smoking crater where Flynn was might have got his attention.
Absolutely. It scared.
I know people in high-ranking positions within the State Department, other places that backed off and decided not to use their position of leverage to have public policy influence, decided not to seek promotions.
Several of them that I knew were looking to exit as quickly as they could because the message that they got was this was like a Stassi-style purge.
When Flynn was taken out.
And the fact that Trump did not really meaningfully come to his defense early made him very, very vulnerable.
And I think Trump has later come to regret it, recognizes the mistake that he made.
But that's what happened.
But they had to go to extraordinary lengths to try to entrap him.
And extraordinarily, managed to keep all the notes and records of the proof of it.
You know, writing down.
Scott Adams was doing, you know, a version of this.
You know, the guy's writing notes and he's saying, maybe I should burn these notes later.
And then things like this.
I mean, it's comic.
It's comedic. And I always say, I don't mind dumb people.
I don't mind criminals.
But I do mind when the two of them get together.
And that's what you have here.
Dumb criminals who occupied, and this is the most terrifying part, occupied some of the most powerful positions in our government.
That's who these people were.
It shows their arrogance.
And it was also incredible.
A lot of their former prosecutors and high-ranking lawyers and legal advisors and former law enforcement people that are on the side of the people that went after Flynn We're actually defending what they saw yesterday, saying, hey, this happens all the time.
We do this routinely.
We make up cases against people all the time.
We fabricate evidence all the time.
And you shouldn't complain because sometimes it's used against drug dealers and terrorists and murderers and rapists.
And it's like, that is exactly why we got a clean house at the top ranks of the FBI and major law enforcement and the rest, because of what we've seen happen to General Flynn.
I got this quote from a lawyer.
These tactics, while maybe unseemly to the public, to put it mildly, I guess, are largely consistent with the very type of deceptive interrogation techniques law enforcement has been permitted to use for at least 50 years.
This isn't a legal bombshell that is likely to slay Flynn in court.
It's simply more political fodder to justify the imminent pardon from the president.
It's incredible. I mean, the reason why we have Miranda is because for about 50 years, from 1900 to 1950, our law enforcement decided the way they were going to get information was to use torture tactics in the interrogation room.
And it got so bad, that's why the Supreme Court stepped in and created Miranda.
And there's all kinds of issues with how Miranda's applied, and there's good arguments on both sides.
You had the early 1970s Clint Eastwood movies that are sort of a cultural rebuttal to maybe the excesses of what some judges were doing and enforcing it.
But the reason why it existed was to stop all of this.
The hope was, I mean, judges were just shocked by case after case after case.
And what happens is some of the least reliable evidence in the world It's evidence deduced from torture, evidence of confessions, evidence of eyewitnesses, in fact.
And it's because the human memory doesn't quite work that way.
And especially when you try to entrap someone, you get false information.
And here what you got was a false conviction.
Someone who was willing to plead guilty to something he did not do, which a lot of people are surprised at.
They're like, well, he confessed.
No, people confess under coerced conditions all the time.
That was what the Inquisition was.
That is what the Star Chamber was.
And unfortunately, we helped replicate that in large aspects of our federal criminal process.
As I tell people, our federal criminal process convicts people at the same at a higher rate than Iran and Russia.
That really should not be the case.
So what Flynn is revealing, while it's specific to his case and President Trump and the abuse of power and the realities of a deep state, I mean, you really can't explain the entrapment of General Flynn unless you have a deep state interpretation of the national security establishment in the United States.
But it also reveals deeply troubling signs of what's happening in our criminal justice system writ large.
Okay, so just so I guess we can sort of pursue this, because the FBI, I've seen it reported, has a 90 to 95% conviction rate.
Boy, that's, you know, I can win at Scrabble, too, if I could just make up my own words.
It's pretty terrifying.
And one of the ways I think they achieved this is with these notes, right?
The interviews are not specifically recorded, but the agents make notes.
Afterwards. Now, that seems to me, I mean, come on, don't be ridiculous.
I mean, you get a deposition, it's all recorded.
You can see all these online with Alex Jones and other people.
So the idea that you wouldn't record it, but you would rely on notes, unverifiable notes, after the fact that I think, what, the 301s, they've been altered, and there's real credibility issues regarding that.
I mean, that is the system that is just set up to fail any legal or ethical standards.
It reminds me a lot of Stephen Glass and the fake media controversies that came out a decade or so ago, where you had a reporter who discovered, you know what, the only way they verify anything is they look at the reporter's notes.
So he just decided, I'll just make up notes of conversations that I had.
And so when he gets caught, it's well described portrayed in the movie, he's like, no, no, no, but my notes say that this conversation happened.
And so it's an incredible degree.
About three or four years ago, a story that got buried by the press came out, where it turned out they were using various forms of national security agency wiretaps to create fake cases, in essence.
It was real cases against real defendants, but fake in the source of the cases.
The source of the cases were illegal wiretaps.
They would create parallel construction.
That's where the whole phraseology sort of entered the popular discourse to say, oh, I really pulled this guy over because I saw him do this or I saw him do that, when in fact it was, oh, actually we'd been trapping him by illicit surveillance activities.
They were doing this on mass scale.
You had agents lying in courts all across the country.
You had hundreds of cases that should have been Tainted and contaminated, and yet somehow there was almost no follow-up action by the government and the courts.
And that's what's happened. It has become systemic and systematic.
Just the risk of human error.
I'll give an example. Political scientists a couple of decades ago said they wanted objective metrics.
To determine, to separate totalitarian from democratic governments because there was so much political ideological dispute about what constituted one or the other.
So they decided, and what they looked at is what do totalitarian governments have in common?
And one of the five things they had in common was a conviction rate in the high 80s or higher.
Because they said just the risk of human error is too high to have that level of conviction rate of someone targeted by the criminal justice process.
Well, of course, now the United States is almost at the very top in its conviction rate.
So it's a sign that, at least in our criminal justice system, we have a quasi-totalitarian system.
And I think what's shocking to a lot of people is your traditional law enforcement-oriented wing of Republican Trump supporters have seen what happens when the system...
They've got to see the system in the way Jim Hightower used to describe He used to say that watching the system come to power is like watching a monkey climb a tree.
It doesn't get any prettier the closer you look and the more it climbs the tree.
And in the same context here, you have this systematic approach where the government's been doing a lot of bad stuff for a couple of decades now, but when it's people like General Flynn Our society becomes much more cognizant of how severe the problem is,
in the same way that when they're witnessing surfers and swimmers and paddleboarders and mamas taking their kids to the park getting arrested currently, they realize, hmm, maybe our police really will just do whatever their bosses tell them to do sometimes.
And now it's a problem.
There needs to be more second-guessing of commands by high-ranking, politically motivated people in our law enforcement infrastructure across the nation, but especially with the FBI and Washington, D.C. Here's a tweet that really struck me, Robert.
A lawyer saying, you!
Oh my God, I can't believe they do this!
It's outrageous! Everyone involved in criminal law, sit down.
I have something to tell you, and it's going to make you sad.
And this, you can see this with the, I mean, the Roger Stone sentencing seemed to me as an outsider outrageously long.
You've got Paul Manafort being indicted in two different districts.
Could that be a ploy to guard against a jury acquittal?
I mean, this just seems to be kind of out of control.
Mueller didn't rein it in. Sessions didn't rein it in.
Obviously, Barr is trying to do so at the moment.
But man, that is quite a hill to climb.
No doubt about it. I mean, an example, I mean, one of my first examples of this, well, I've had many.
I just happen to have a lot of politically motivated criminal cases I ended up involved in.
But when they targeted Wesley Snipes, they ended up indicting him in Ocala, Florida, where he had never even been before.
So they could have prosecuted the case in D.C. They could have prosecuted the case in New York.
They could have prosecuted the case in L.A. or New Jersey.
But there you had racially diverse juries and you had Wesley Snipes fans that might be in the jury pool.
They chose Ocala because they literally had the entire jury pool was all white.
It had the highest per capita incidence of racial hatred incidents in the entire country.
They did like racist Father's Day.
I didn't even know some of these holidays existed in Ocala.
They still had a statute to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan outside the local courthouse that they hadn't put up until the 1950s.
My favorite part of it was that they misspelled his name because the local area is known for A-Forest.
So because Nathan Bedford Forrest was the founder of the Klan, they thought his name was spelled like Forrest, so they didn't realize there were two R's.
But, you know, God bless them.
But, you know, there's a reason why they chose Ocala to prosecute snipes.
And there's a bunch of co-defendants that were potentially prosecuted in that case.
There were country boys from Ocala.
Well, guess where they chose to prosecute them?
They chose to prosecute them in the District of Columbia.
So it was just obvious manipulation of the venues, manipulation to get a certain judge, manipulation to get a certain jury pool.
They had done PR leaks against him, selectively leaking information that wasn't supposed to come out.
Now, we still obtained acquittals for him on all the felony fraud charges, half the misdemeanor charges, and the rest.
But that was supposed to be the impossible case and the impossible place.
And it shows the scale and scope to it.
I mean, that was just a basic tax case with some political overtones to it.
And yet they're willing to go to all those lengths to try to rig the outcome.
And what happened to Roger was rigged from beginning to end.
I mean, he was gagged unconstitutionally throughout the whole case, unable to mount his public defense.
The jury corruption was allowed to occur because the judge made the jury effectively an anonymous jury.
So we, the citizens, could not look up whether they had these biases.
Because if we had done the equivalent of crowdfunding, but crowd research, This would have been exposed before the case even went to verdict.
But it didn't happen because the judge said, I'm going to keep the jury anonymous, something that's been controversial and, in my view, is unconstitutional.
It's foreign to our legal history until the last couple of decades.
It's supposed to be reserved to mob and terrorism cases, not a Roger Stone case.
The District of Columbia has been doing jury nullification for Antifa in a range of cases.
So that's the worst. That jury pool is like being Martin Luther King tried in 1963 Birmingham.
Good luck with that. That's what Roger Stone got.
And so it's been rigged case after rigged case after rigged case.
And the beautiful part of the Flynn defense is it's only because General Flynn had second thoughts the day of the sentencing, based on comments of the court made, that were even here.
Otherwise, he may have been sentenced to a year, and this would have been the end of the story.
We never heard anything about this.
Sorry, what did he hear in court that changed his mind?
So what happened is Judge Sullivan started raising questions, suggesting that if General Flynn went forward, he might sentence him harshly.
So he went in there, still with his former counsel, with the Covington firm, a day of sentencing itself, and basically the judge had two problems.
The judge said, one, by some of the statements that General Flynn was making, it sounded to the judge like the general believed he was innocent, and the judge wasn't gonna sentence someone who believed they were innocent.
And secondly, he said, if you did go forward, so that was sort of almost a carrot, if you will, and then the stick was, if you do go forward, I may sentence you much harsher than your lawyers have advised you, because what the government's really accusing you of is the equivalent to treason, and I take that very seriously.
And so that shocked General Flynn.
It was contrary to what his lawyers had advised him was going to happen that day.
And so General Flynn said he requested time to reconsider what his path would be moving forward.
And that's the only way that happened.
If the judge had been corrupt enough, the judge would have known that this was an inside deal to make sure it got processed in a certain way, would have given him probation, and that way the government could have covered up everything that had happened.
And so it came that close to us never finding out the truth at all and to people believing that General Flynn committed a crime that he in fact never committed.
And so it shows how the process can work if it goes AWOL in this case.
Well, and of course, if Hillary had gotten in, all of the malfeasance not related to Flynn, of course, that's post, but all of the malfeasance would almost certainly have never come to light.
Let's talk a little bit about what happened with General Flynn's son.
Because, you know, I've never liked this whole thing, or you can't possibly bribe anyone in the legal system, with the exception of offering someone five years off their sentence if they confess.
You know, that seems to me even more than a financial bribe, and I don't like the way that whole plea bargaining thing works.
It keeps a Greasy, gut-wrenching machinery running in its horrifying perfection.
But to me, at least, you know, and I think it's in the law too, like going after people's family, threatening people's family, that's straight up mob tactics.
I mean, what happened with General Flynn's son?
Exactly. So in the context, basically General Flynn's only sort of area of potential risk or exposure was the various activities he had done on behalf of various governments while he was in private sector for a very brief period of time.
Between the time the Obama administration let him go and the time Trump was elected.
As part of that, his son, Michael Flynn Jr., worked with him on some of those projects.
So because that's a very regulatory, intense world, in general, by the way, almost no one's ever been prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
I think there are six prosecutions in the history of the country until Mueller decided to use it like a madman.
It's the problem, like there's a tweet, a Twitter feed out there that's called Crime A Day, and it has all the insane things that are crimes in the United States, you know, whether or not you sold bees with the wrong packaging and stuff like that.
This is why it's a problem, because in the wrong hands, it can be a show-me-the-man-and-I'll-find-you-the-crime Berea-style approach in the name of the famous corrupt intelligence officer of Soviet era.
Like what happened with Gibson guitars, too, seemed pretty shady as well.
Oh, absolutely. And there's plenty of cases that have happened like this in the United States.
They just haven't had this degree of profile, typically.
And so what they did is they always try to—it's always mob tactics.
And to give an example, if I, as a defense lawyer, had any of the power that the prosecutor has— Half of the cases would be unsuccessful with ease, would never even reach indictment.
If I could go to a witness and say, well, I think you did a bunch of bad stuff, but I'll make sure you're never prosecuted if you tell me what I want you to hear, they would prosecute me the next day for obstruction of justice and bribery and whatnot.
For example, they even threatened me.
I once simply sued somebody who had been lying about my client and had caused them all kinds of economic problems.
They were also a key whistleblower, but the reason they were whistleblowers is they'd been stealing from my client.
The very next day, the U.S. Attorney's Office called up and threatened to prosecute me for quote-unquote obstruction of justice.
So while that was nonsense, of course, that was one of my client's legal rights, it was evidence of what they think they're doing.
If they think merely suing someone can get them to falsely testify, Well, then what does threatening them with putting them in the prison for years or their family in prison for years or bankrupting them, what does that induce?
The truthful testimony?
I don't think so. And so in that context, the other MO they use is they look at anyone close to you.
So I see it a lot in tax cases.
They look at wives.
They look at children. They look at business allies.
They look at close friends.
They look at everyone who...
And part of it is they go after it by saying, well, you know what?
If you don't cooperate with me, you don't give me what I want...
That I'm going to make your business life miserable.
I'm going to make your personal life miserable.
And so forth. That's one aspect of it.
The other aspect of it where it accelerates is I'm going to find something that someone you care about did something wrong.
And if you don't plead, that person's going to face the music for it.
Now, because they are not supposed to do that within the internal ethical rules.
In fact, when you do a plea bargain, you're forced to tell the judge.
The judge says, did anything motivate you to do this other than your guilt?
Well, there's probably not a criminal defendant in the country that actually can say, honestly, that the only reason I did this plea was because I'm feeling so guilty.
That's just not normally the case.
Almost always, it's some degree of coercive pressure.
But you're supposed to sit there as the lawyer with the client and go along with this sham.
Say, no, no, nothing influenced them except their guilt.
It's all about, we've created a more sophisticated version of the Inquisition in the Star Chamber.
Our system still loves confessional guilt, even though that confessional guilt is frequently coerced, and even though that confessional guilt is often wrong.
As I always like to tell people, two least reliable forms of evidence in the history of the United States, confessions and eyewitness testimonies.
The things that they think are the most compelling are, in fact, the least for a wide range of reasons.
But in The Confession, there's a great movie.
I think it's called Under Suspicion or Undue Suspicion.
Morgan Freeman, Dean Hackman in Puerto Rico.
And they lead you through the case.
And towards the end of the movie, you think, man, the cop really nailed him.
And then you figure out that, in fact, there was a false confession all along.
Because they feel guilty about something else, they shifted it to over here.
This happens all the time.
It's why we don't trust those tactics anymore.
It was part of the reason for Miranda.
It wasn't just let's protect people's inviolate individual constitutional rights.
It was this is a bad investigatory method.
They kept seeing cases that they were having to throw out because they got false confessions that were coerced.
And they're like, no, enough of this.
This just helps criminals walk free.
And so the same thing happened here.
They went after General Flynn's son.
And what they said is, look, maybe you, General Flynn, did everything right on the regulatory aspect.
There's people who still think he did illicit lobbying and was acting as a secret foreign agent.
That never happened. That whole case in Virginia blew up.
The judge ended up dismissing the case.
They ended up admitting Flynn did nothing wrong in that context.
They also ended up admitting in the context of that case they didn't really have any evidence That Flynn's son did anything wrong either.
But they created this impression that if you're someone that's new to that world, both Flynn and his kid were, they've done very little work in that world, except for that two, three year time period.
You have no idea whether all the rules were complied with because there's so many rules.
You don't know, did we file this form in the right place?
Did we identify this right?
The law firm defending Flynn was the law firm responsible for making sure all that paperwork was accurate.
This is why they were hiding information.
This is why they had to coerce him to plea.
But so they said, look, we're going to look at anybody who's put under a macroscopic, microscopic view by something as powerful as federal criminal law enforcement that has access to every financial transaction you've ever done, that can monitor every phone call, that already has records to a large degree of every text and email you ever sent.
Every internet search you ever did, there's almost no one that could hold up under that degree of threat, especially when they can threaten anyone who's ever known you to make stuff up against you.
I mean, the extraordinary thing in all of this It was the inability of Mueller to get anybody to flip on Trump and just make stuff up, because it shows the degree to which there was literally nothing there that they couldn't even find something to fabricate.
I mean, they got Michael Cohen to try to fabricate a few things, but that was about it.
And the problem was he contradicted himself, of course, the nature of lies, what webs we weave when first we set out to deceive.
And the real webs here all came back on the government because they were the ones set out to deceive.
Deceive courts, deceive defendants, deceive the American public.
And they got exposed in the process, which is what's the unusual part, the rare part, the unique part.
And now the question is what really happens with it?
What remedy takes place? And the reason why they did an off-the-books agreement with General Flynn You can't put in there, hey, by the way, I pled because they threatened my son.
Because the court's supposed to say, well, that's a coerced plea.
I can't allow that plea. So that's why they said, don't worry, we won't put it in writing.
We'll just have a little side agreement, a little off-the-books, Enron-style plea accounting.
And that's precisely what they did.
But now the documents, of course, that prove that were now finally discovered by the Department of Justice that just sort of missed them in the last couple of years, apparently.
Well, and Mueller, too, with his, what, 40 FBI agents, more than a dozen lawyers, tens of millions of dollars in two and a half years, just somehow managed to skate over these exculpatory documents.
Exactly. And that's the same Mueller that, you know, if people look at the cases going back to child pornography cases in California.
Oh, Isaac Asimov's son, if I remember rightly.
Yes, exactly. He somehow takes over that case, and then magically he ends up not prosecuted at all.
He ends up returning.
They give him a sweetheart deal.
He does no time, and they return to him the materials they seized.
Which is just mind-numbing.
He shows up later, of course, with George Nadler and others, who's now being prosecuted for a wide range of points.
He was listed as an asset.
Epstein was listed as an asset of Mueller in internal reports.
It's like they were trying to blame the prosecutor for what went on down there.
That was all about Mueller is what went on down there, the reason why Epstein was not meaningfully prosecuted the first time around.
If people can look at the Noriega case, they can look at how Mueller magically pops up in the Boston FBI at the same time they're trying to cover up what Whitey Bulger was doing on behalf of the FBI and FBI agents were doing on behalf of him.
The extraordinary aspects of what he covered up in the Noriega case, that was sort of a test case for how he could corrupt the judicial process for politicized purposes.
And then you go to BCCI, HSBC, if you have a sort of deep state style scandal in the last 20, 25 years, Robert Mueller magically somehow pops up on the scene somewhere along the way.
So it's who he was.
It's what he was. Now, I think he's getting over the timeline in terms of mental capacity.
He's got Joe Biden disease, I think, over the last year or so.
So he wasn't able to be as effective as he had been in the past.
But it shows you the pernicious power of wayward prosecutions, that they did this to a lot of innocent people.
And the people who may have done stuff wrong, like Manafort, They prosecuted him like he was a mob boss.
I mean, it was just insane tactics.
I mean, the guy's literally at Rikers Island.
I mean, what'd he do?
He does the same things that they could prosecute 80% of people in Washington for doing every single day.
Right. Okay, let's just drop past two little things more.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask a lawyer to explain a bill, but when they have...
Actual recordings of the conversation.
How is it that he ends up burning through, like, was it $5 million plus sold his house?
I mean, how is it that he ends up burning through that much money if they apparently have this airtight case, they have the 301s, they have the recordings of the conversation itself?
I mean... How is this possible that so much money has to flow to the lawyers for this kind of situation?
It frequently happens.
The way a lot of high-profile civil cases work and high-profile criminal cases work is that usually your criminal defense lawyer is a corporate firm, a white shoe firm.
Same in a lot of some of your political civil litigation.
And their real objective is to burn through as much cash of the client as possible and then coerce a confession from them or a concession from them that effectively betrays them.
As I always tell people, the Star Chamber, you had a lawyer.
It was just the lawyer was really working for the Star Chamber, just not working for you, but was supposed to be working for you.
A lot of people who dominate the criminal defense field are former prosecutors.
I always say if you cut them, they still believe government blue.
It's a mindset and mentality.
They're former inquisitors who are there to help you understand your guilt and bring you to the confessional booth.
In exchange for them doing that, they get themselves rich by billing the heck out of you while during the stage they're pretending they're going to help you.
That's just the modus operandi Of major politically motivated, politically contaminated cases in the United States.
I'm often the third or fourth lawyer someone has hired.
And usually when that's the case, it's because they were innocent, naive, went with the big name lawyer, and the big name lawyer sold them down the river.
It's just one illustration of that.
Jeff Skilling in the Enron case really had some potential defenses where maybe the banks were more responsible than he was for what went on at Enron.
And instead, his defense lawyer never brought up blaming the banks for what took place.
Well, why? Well, his law firm was a law firm that gets 10 times more money from banks over time than we get from him.
So they have institutional conflicts of interest.
You're asking them to betray their class.
And they're never going to do that.
They're going to say, on behalf of you, I will defend you and represent you and vindicate you.
You're going to make me rich. But at the end of the day, I got to coerce your confession or concession because I'm not going to betray my class for you, the outsider, the independent person.
And so that's how a lot of that sort of unfolds and unfurls in the American system.
It's an institutional flaw.
A second component of that is I've often argued that our entire tripartite form of government, the separation of powers, It does not work in one area above all, and it's the area of lawyers.
So as a lawyer, the legislature doesn't write the rules that govern me.
The court system does.
The executive branch doesn't enforce any rules against me.
The judicial branch does.
And then who gets to adjudicate that?
The judicial branch.
So who's going to see judicial corruption more than anybody?
Who's going to see governmental and institutional corruption more than anyone?
A lawyer. But if you expose it, you're exposing it to the very people who control the rules that govern you, that control the ability for you to practice your profession and occupation, and will adjudicate any dispute concerning you.
So the net effect of it, that's why when I was early on involved in the legal process, I recognized two things.
One, you couldn't be too rooted in a local community because the parochial politics would force you out.
in terms of your professional pedigree and secondly I had to be willing to take stands and not be intimidated Because almost right away, one of the things state judges and federal judges did was threaten me personally and professionally.
Threatened me with contempt charges, threatened me with ethics referrals, threatened me in some way.
And what you're seeing is you're seeing the system use its power of licensure.
And I think there's a lot of good libertarian critiques of licensing in general.
I don't believe lawyers should even be required licensing.
Let the people decide. I think anybody could make a good legal advocate.
Anybody has the capacity of rational thought, the capacity of research, the capacity of advocacy.
You don't need seven years of education and a pretty degree on the wall to achieve that.
But the reason why they don't allow Joe Schmo is because Joe Schmo might challenge the system, whereas the idea is they'll filter you out.
They don't have the license collar on you, right?
Exactly. Their thought process is, if we take you through seven years, we're going to make sure that we screen out the Ed Snowdens of the world so that they don't accidentally end up in positions of government.
I mean, to give you an example, when I was in law school, I wanted to be a prosecutor.
That was my objective.
Because the only ethical mandate of a prosecutor is to do justice, nothing else.
I thought that was fantastic. And yet me and a bunch of friends of ours, friends of mine, who all finished towards the top of our class, had a bunch of awards, recognition, all that jazz, Could not even get an interview at a small county state prosecutor's office, even though our mentor, law professor at law school, was someone who had great weight and influence in the prosecutor's departments.
And one day he finally told me, he thought he was telling me something embarrassing or something that I would find bad.
It was a compliment in my view, but it was very informative too.
Years later, I came back and I talked to him.
I was like, Professor, why could I never get an interview at a prosecutor's office while people who finish at the bottom of our class were getting jobs?
And he said, well, Bob, I don't want to offend you or anything, but they're not really looking for people like you.
What do you mean? He's like, independent people who are a little too reflective.
I was like, oh! I was like, well, that's not a criticism.
That's a compliment, but it's very revelatory.
People who are self-reflective, people who are independent, people who will second-guess established wisdom, people who won't just turn up the dial and the shock and the Milgram experiment.
They need those people to be nowhere near positions of power.
And imagine how powerful that corrupting culture is, that corrosively corrupting culture of the sort of gated institutional narrative to steal from Eric Weinstein is that even small little counties in Wisconsin won't make sure that people like me don't even get an interview.
It tells you how bad that process is.
And they've done a good job. That's why you don't see a lot of prosecutorial whistleblowers.
When you get to prove the evidence, it's because they accidentally keep their own notes.
Hey, I'm going to commit treason today.
Let's see how this works. Well, isn't that...
Trump doesn't use email, right?
So let's close with this, because there's a guy named Turley who wrote, this new information magnifies long-standing doubts over the Flynn case.
Mueller decided to pressure him into a plea, despite the fact that the investigators indicated that they did not believe that he intentionally lied about this one aspect of the conversation with the Russian ambassador.
In the meantime, various FBI figures lied and acted in arguably criminal or unethical ways, but all escaped without a charge.
It is a record as a whole truly shocks the conscience.
While rare, it is still possible for the district court to right this wrong since Flynn is not sentenced.
So what could happen that could help the American justice system out of this case?
If our system works, because in reality when the facts were fully known, the indictment of General Flynn turned out to be the indictment of the criminal justice system and the indictment of the deep state's influence over it.
And if the court wants to restore some integrity, restore some credibility, then what Judge Sullivan should do is dismiss all charges against General Flynn And make a referral for criminal investigation and potential prosecution of all the prosecutors and agents that were complicit in violating the rules concerning General Flynn.
Now, if that doesn't happen, Attorney General Barr should step in and Attorney General Barr should dismiss all the proceedings and open up a criminal referral against the individuals involved.
And if that doesn't happen, then the president has to use his presidential power to pardon General Flynn and make a public statement about how this needs to stop.
This is outrageous work, and he expects more from the Justice Department moving forward.
Because at this point, this is no longer just about General Flynn.
This is about faith and confidence in the integrity of our criminal justice process as it applies to all Americans.
Because if they could do this to someone like General Flynn, imagine what they're doing every day to some little independent dissident outsider somewhere in America.
So the threat is real and palpable and the remedy has to be equally significant and substantial.
In order to have meaningful reform and confidence in our system.
I will tell you upfront that I am not overly confident of anything other than a pardon occurring.
Having experienced the criminal justice process, it has been rare and unusual to see the justice system do justice, except for when there's massive political and public pressure.
So hopefully they will do the right thing and restore a little bit of confidence in the system.
But if not, the president has to execute his pardon power and start looking at executing it across the board.
I mean, for example, I believe today Roger Stone is supposed to report to federal prison.
It's time for the president to step up and start issuing pardons when his remedy, his power, is the last power available to restore at least a little bit of justice in America.
Well, I guess that helps if you're friends with the president, but for everyone else, you know, watch your back.
All right. Well, thanks so much for your time today.
Always a great pleasure to chat. If you could just let my listeners know where to find you on Twitter, online and other places.
Sure. At Twitter, I'm still there.
Ever since I sued them, they've been a little bit of, you know, take some objection in the form of a wide range of shadow banning and other stuff.
But at Barnes underscore Law, and they can go to the website BarnesLawLLP.com.
Where they can find the legal cases.
And then I'm supporting the work of the group I helped start called Free America Law Center.
That's just freeamericalawcenter.com.
People can go there and look at the cases that we're doing.
We have a case that's actually related to General Flynn's prosecution.
We're helping Robin Gritz go after Andrew McCabe and the FBI. That was someone that Flynn stood up for and helped lead to his potential targeting.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate all the great work you're doing to maintain these freedoms and heartily recommend that if you have challenges in this area, a conversation with Robert will be very, very productive.
So thanks very much for your time.
And remember, it's Barnes with an E. I'm about to say that.
Not like a barn door, but Barnes with an E. Thanks, Robert.
Really great pleasure to chat.
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