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May 14, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:08
General Flynn - Heads Should Roll! Lawyer Robert Barnes and Stefan Molyneux
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Alright, hi everybody. We're back with lawyer extraordinaire Robert Barnes from Barnes Law.
I'll put the links to all of his work below.
Please call him if you have any issues.
He's a great guy to chat with about this stuff.
And we're back talking about General Flynn.
Were you surprised at what came out this week, this dropping of charges?
Yes, to a certain degree, as to both the timing and the fact that Attorney General Barr finally took action, because he'd been talking a lot, and it was so extreme.
I mean, what I said earlier in the week was, it's insane that he has not taken action yet.
It was clear at this point the case had no merit to move forward, and he should not be waiting for a court to do something that the Justice Department should be doing.
And so in that context, I think he finally did the right thing.
Now, one of the things that's always troubled me is when the government goes there to talk to someone and they ask a bunch of questions and then they charge them for a process crime.
That's always seemed to me to be kind of, well, literally fishy in that it's a fishing expedition and also that it's really kind of hinky from a sort of legal justice standpoint.
Is that a fair assessment of them going in to talk about a call?
With Sysniak that they already had recorded, they already had the transcript of, and just trying to catch him in a process crime?
It was a completely absurd prosecution on multiple levels, because there was no open, what they admitted now, there was no open investigation formally.
It had been recommended to be closed, number one.
Number two, they were going in to talk to him about something that was entirely within his legal right to do.
The Logan Act, even if applied, didn't apply to him under that set of circumstances as a transition official.
And then last but not least, they're asking him about a conversation they already know the details of.
So it's basically, hey, let's do a memory test and let's see how good his memory is, especially under circumstances where he doesn't know that he's doing a memory test.
And that's why, like, from the get-go, it was never clear to me how his representation statement could be quote-unquote material under the law.
So people think that if you ever lie to the FBI, it's a crime.
That's not true. Otherwise, you know, if your spouse happened to be an FBI agent and you...
Sorry, you just gave me some body chills there, brother.
Okay, I'm back. Exactly, exactly.
Then the nature of it, then all the spouses would be in prison already.
So if lying within Congress, for example, was a crime, all the Congress members would end up in prison.
So what it requires is a formal investigation and that you have to be lying for the purposes of interfering with that investigation.
To give you an example of this, years ago, United States v.
Aguilar, a federal judge, lied to a couple of FBI agents.
And in the process of lying to those FBI agents, Knowing that there was a potential grand jury out there, they ultimately charged him with obstructing a grand jury.
But the nature of the case was such that his lie could not have impacted the grand jury's job.
So it goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And the U.S. Supreme Court determines that cannot be obstruction of justice of the grand jury.
So that gives you an idea of the degree to it.
When a federal judge can lie to FBI agents knowing there's a grand jury case and yet still cannot be charged with obstruction of justice, it gives you an idea of what they're supposed to be able to have to prove in that context.
Now, these 302s, right, so the sort of written reports that are made after the fact, the recordings aren't there, and I was just talking to Mike C. yesterday, and he was talking about how, well, the reason they don't want these things recorded is they're going to threaten you, your bone marrow, your descendants, your pets, your goldfish, you name it, and they don't want people to see, you know, like the old saying says, there's two things you don't want to see getting made, laws and sausages.
And this altering though, I mean, if it's going to be the rule that they can write stuff down afterwards, if they get altered...
That is appalling at every conceivable level and gives people an adversarial relationship with the law.
In other words, they're going to use it as a political tool to get you.
It's a state of nature, whatever you can get away with.
There's no respect for the morality.
Do you think it's possible?
What is it going to take to try and restore the reputation both of the DOG pre-bar and of the FBI pre, I don't know, today?
Yeah. I think there's two aspects to it.
One is the Barr clearly has to take more action because it was a great day for General Flynn, a great day for Sidney Powell.
It is not yet a great day for American justice unless a lot more happens.
This is a small step along a long road.
They went after a guy who their own investigation determined had done nothing wrong.
Their own investigation up to that point of the interview had said that there's literally not a single piece of derogatory information they could find about it.
And in the FBI parlance, that's a very broad term.
That means that there was nothing to even give reason of suspicion of anything wrong.
He's about as clean as they come, right?
Absolutely. That's the cleanest.
To be that clean in Washington requires an extraordinary set of skills.
I assume that all of his bad actions were done by an evil twin that nobody's found, but that's a theory for another time.
Exactly. So it's fascinating listening to these people defend the prosecution and attack the Justice Department for finally doing the right thing.
It gives you an idea.
A lot of the people making these attacks on the press, MSNBC, CNN, other places, Ben Whitty's on Lawfare and the rest, these are people that have influence.
These are people that currently have officials in high-ranking positions of power.
You saw both James Comey and others call for those people to stay in positions of power yesterday.
So it tells you how dangerous the situation is that people that think that Flynn got treated right and what was wrong was the final decision to realize that they should not continue to wrong him tells you how bad the situation is.
So the idea that they think of these things are systematic.
The idea of trying to set someone up for a A perjury trap is supposed to be normal.
In a case where there's no legitimate investigation, that entrapment is supposed to be okay.
That threatening family members is supposed to be okay.
Extortionate plea bargaining is what that really is.
If it was the shoe was on the other foot and the defense lawyer did that, they would call it a crime.
And if you go further, they not only basically hid evidence, they fabricated evidence because that's what you're talking about the 302 is.
When someone is writing the 302, The interview notes and did not even sit in on the interview, then you get a sense of it.
And he was dumb enough, of course, to text his mistress that he was trying to pretend to be the other guy's voice.
So this was not even an honest 302 at all.
I mean, it wasn't even an honest attempt at a 302.
It was a dishonest attempt.
It was forging a 302, fabricating a 302.
This should be crimes.
Why Peter Strozik hasn't been prosecuted yet is beyond me.
But at this juncture, it shows one, Roger Stone should be pardoned tomorrow based on what took place.
And second, they should go ahead and commute Manafort's sentence.
It's obvious the whole thing was a travesty of justice in the prosecution.
And Manafort served plenty of time already.
And then everyone else needs to, there need to be some big heads to roll so that people get the message that this is not okay.
Because clearly they have not yet received that message in full.
So this, of course, is a strange thing.
From the outside, people looking at Hillary Clinton walking, despite the fact that she's telling people to strip the classified headers and send it to me via unsecured fax and has her email server wide open to the planet.
She walks. But Manafort and Stone and Flynn, they're all caught up in, and this is, it's the contrast, I think, between the before and after the Trump administration.
It's the contrast of who gets away with what and who gets caught with nothing.
So if you could just dip into Manafort and Stone as well.
I didn't get to those with Mike yesterday, but I'm getting a lot of questions about, okay, well, what does this mean from a sort of ripple effect if this is what's been going on in the FBI? It's so systematic and so systemic.
The fact that they created an investigation that didn't exist, then used entrapment to try to create a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed, then charged a crime that even the Department of Justice ultimately admitted was not a crime because no statement, even if inaccurate, was material to any pending investigation.
It could not impact. You can't lie about something they already know is a lie and impact the investigation by definition.
That's why Flynn never had any motivation to lie and no reason to lie and didn't really lie in any material manner.
And definitely didn't knowingly lie, as the FBI itself admitted.
When you have a case that egregious, and then they cover up the documents, they engage in extortion and plea bargaining, they try to fabricate and forge memorandums of interview.
That shows you how severe it is.
And these were the highest ranking people within the FBI and the Justice Department.
And when people like James Comey see what happens, what he does is double down and say, we need to do more of this rather than less.
So in that context, it shows these are the same people in the Mueller team that went after Paul Manafort, that went after Roger Stone, and as consequence, they should not be allowed to get the benefits of the illicit fruits of their poisonous tree of illicit activity.
And that includes the conviction and sentence of both Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
In Roger Stone's case, they fixed it every single way you know is possible.
They fixed it by choosing a DC jury in the first place.
The case did not have to be tried in DC. It could have been tried in New York.
It could have been tried in Florida where they would have got a much more fair and impartial both jury pool and judge.
They handpicked the judge by rigging the way the case was assigned.
Rather than getting random assignment, they made sure a judge who was hostile to Stone, as evidenced in her prior hostility to Manafort and others, was handpicked for the case, even though it was not a related case in any meaningful manner legally.
Then after that, they rigged the way Roger Stone and his lawyers could defend himself in the court of public opinion to out various… Oh, with a gag order, right?
Exactly. Completely unconstitutional gag order.
There was nothing about that gag order that was constitutional.
And the way that has impact on your real trial is that otherwise witnesses would come forward.
In fact, already people are coming forward with information that did not come forward previously talking about how the main witness in the case likely committed perjury against Roger Stone.
The people would have come forward and researched the jurors and would have exposed juror bias that did not get discovered until after the trial.
That's the real reason they do a gag order.
They're not worried about a jury being biased in favor of Roger Stone in Washington, D.C. Not in Washington, no.
They were worried about...
It was the same thing as having Martin Luther King tried a 1963 Birmingham with an all-white jury.
So that's what they did. But they kept rigging it more and more and more.
They rigged it in terms of what discovery got turned over.
A lot of the discovery we're seeing finally got turned over to General Flynn.
I suspect there's other incriminatory information against the government and exculpatory for Roger Stone that was never provided in his trial.
We'll likely find that out at some point.
And then, of course, the trial itself had major problems with the way the judge proved it.
Presided over the trial. The jury was a completely biased, handpicked jury, picked really for their bias.
Even when that was evidenced, the judge covered it up rather than take meaningful action, limited the scope of cross-examination of those jurors after the trial.
So it's a case, and he was sentenced to something that was still completely, I mean, the original recommendation was absurd, but the actual sentence was still nuts.
Because for an older defendant, first-time defendant, in a very minor case about whether he was fully accurate to Congress, I mean, if Congress could be prosecuted the same way, they would all be in prison, is to get three, four years?
That's unprecedented. Just go back and look at General Petraeus, who was doing far worse.
So the other people in the comparable situation usually get probation.
So everything about his case was rigged from the beginning to end in ways that violated core constitutional rights and liberties.
Sorry, as Roger himself has pointed out, you know, he's a guy with asthma, there's COVID, the prisons are kind of a hotbed of infection.
I mean, it is kind of in the vicinity of a death sentence.
And people are seeing this elderly political operative who's got insouciance and style and panache and so on and has a really charismatic side to him.
They're seeing him on the conveyor belt going to prison for something that nobody can really understand.
I mean, it's not like he strangled a hobo or something like that.
Like nobody can really understand what the issue is with him.
So they're seeing a conveyor belt of Trump supporters heading towards prison while they're seeing a conveyor belt of violent criminals coming out of prison because, you know, it's just too dangerous for them in there.
Exactly. And the Roger Stone and General Flynn case have another key area of commonality, aside from prosecutorial misconduct, and it's that same issue of materiality.
Because there really was nothing they were ever able to accuse Roger of that was material to a congressional investigation.
So if Roger had told them, okay, it was really this person rather than that person, and I was mostly trying to exaggerate my influence with this person rather than that person, that has no impact on the Russia investigation.
They admitted that there was no ties whatsoever between Roger and Russia.
So that was the only thing that would be quote-unquote material.
So the whole point of perjury and obstruction of justice charges is they have to be impactful Or at least reasonably likely to impact an actual investigation.
They have to make the government's job difficult to do, deliberately.
And there was no evidence in Roger Stone's trial that happened, just as there was no evidence in General Flynn.
And that was the main reason, in General Flynn's case, the Justice Department said we have to dismiss charges.
They said nothing here impacted any lawful investigation.
Same is true in Roger Stone's case.
On the same basis, his case should be dismissed.
I don't expect the Justice Department to take action there, though.
I think the President has to.
Well, and of course, everyone can see this aforementioned conveyor belt, though, this time filled with people who've lied about far more serious things to Congress who face no repercussions for their actions.
Oh, precisely, all over the place.
I mean, the double standard is extraordinary.
We've had the Obama-appointed inspector general...
We refer both James Comey and Andrew McCabe for the purposes of criminal referral for criminal prosecution, and we've seen no criminal prosecution in either case.
So what they did was extraordinary.
What they did was truly corrupt and pervert the course of justice, and yet they're not seeing any consequences while people who are simply entrapped and railroaded are faced either bankruptcy in the case of General Flynn or prison time in the case of Roger Stone.
Well, okay, so looking at this sort of double standard, this kind of hypocrisy is a pretty powerful thing when you look at just how much people are being prosecuted for process crimes where people who seem to have committed real perjury in important material matters are skating.
Everybody now who said, oh yeah, you know, the Russia collusion stuff is totally real and we need to...
Now, of course, the facts are coming out and forgive me for not exactly knowing the source, but we're reading all these people saying, oh yeah, no, we have no material direct evidence of Russia collusion, that we've not seen anything that ties, blah, blah, blah.
So this whole two plus year Mueller nightmare that culminated in a faux impeachment was all based upon nothing that had any material or probative value and everybody's skating from that.
Seems a little bit more important than Roger Stone bragging.
What you had was a massive coup attempt by people who, I compare it to Our Man in Havana, great movie, great book by Graham Greene, another version of that by John Le Carr called Taylor of Panama.
And it basically previews Christopher Steele and everything that was happening.
And that's coming out in the London trial that related to defamation and libel issues.
CrowdStrike had to admit, came out today, that they don't have any evidence that any emails were ever removed from the DNC servers by anyone connected to Russia.
Well, that's sort of big news.
And apparently Mueller's team knew it and tried to hide it by the way they couched the language.
That's been the whole predicate for all of this, purportedly.
Not only that, Christopher Steele says he can't identify sources, has lost all of his notes, is missing his records.
Basically, he's our man in Nirvana towards the end who gets caught.
And it's very commonplace, as Taylor of Panama describes, for people in the spy world, the spook world, to make up stories.
They're like Stephen Glass, the famous journalist who just figured as long as he faked his stories in his own little journalist notepad...
Because you realize that's all journalists did was say, look at my notepad, sort of the way the FBI said, hey, look at our little 302 here.
It's like, well, you got to write that.
You got to make that up after the fact.
That'd be like saying, oh, my diary here says I'm innocent.
I wrote it down yesterday. But it's in my own handwriting, man.
Exactly. That's the nuttiness of how some aspects of our criminal justice process work and how a lot of our spook world works.
That's why we don't know where things are.
That's why we didn't know The Soviet Union was going to collapse.
That's why we didn't know that there was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
That's why we imagined that Afghanistan was going to be a wonderful, peaceful place somehow magically overnight.
This happens because our spooks are mostly morons.
And the other ones, the ones that are skilled, they're fraudsters.
They're cheats. They've learned, hey, I can just make up anything and say, talk to this source, that source, the other source, and whatever you want to hear.
And that's what Steele was feeding.
He was feeding whatever people wanted to hear.
That's why the The stories about Trump got crazier and crazier and crazier.
And everybody who watched that or read that, even Bob Woodward said, this is probably totally fake because he's been around spook world a long time, going back to writing about the CIA in the 80s.
And I think now that that's what's coming out.
What's coming out is you had people just doctoring things, fabricating things, making up stories, fictionalizing things, but with real world consequences.
Real-world consequences on individuals, undermining the elected president of the United States, and basically making it very difficult for Trump to have freedom of action as it related to issues of war or Russia or radical Islam.
And all of that was a function of these people making up stories for a docile or complicit press that led to a lot of ordinary individuals, people like Michael Caputo and others, either having to go broke or facing prison time.
Well, it is a tragic thing, of course, when you look at the vindication of General Flynn and you say, this is a great day.
It's like, it reminds me of the old Churchill quote after Dunkirk where he said, wars are not won by successful evacuations.
And, you know, it is kind of frustrating, of course.
People do want to see a blow against the deep state or whatever you want to call it.
And all that seems to happen is the bullets keep firing.
Some of them miss and everybody says, we're winning the war because we dodged a bullet.
And I guess that's the big question.
I mean, we're definitely going to speculative territory here, but I'm curious what your thoughts are, Robert, about is there a time, do you think it's coming, where the hunted are going to become the hunters?
You know, there's so much pressure now that Barr has built up himself for John Durham to take action.
Here's the background of John Durham.
United States Attorney assigned to Special Counsel by Attorney General Barr to look at everything related to the Russiagate inquiries and investigations and whether they were properly done and whether...
Any legal action ethical or criminal should take place.
On the one hand, he did help clean up the Boston issues related to their use of a mobster as their informant, in which they were doing the mobster's business for quite a long period of time.
Old Hoover style, you might say.
Robert Mueller actually makes a cameo appearance in that process, but that's another story for another day.
But Derm did go in and clean that up.
On the flip side, he said he was going to do a lot about what was happening with the CIA and Guantanamo and rendition and torture and ultimately gave them all a clean slate.
So that's their, just like Barr, who has a mixed history.
His rhetoric is strong.
His political history doesn't suggest strong action.
The same is true of Durham, that he has more of a conflicted history.
One says, yeah, he will try to do something to fix things.
The other says he won't go too far in ways that undermine the institutional power of the FBI or Justice Department.
But I think now, in order to maintain the appearance of integrity with the Justice Department, they absolutely need a couple of big heads that they put on stake so everybody knows this is not okay.
I think a major mistake of all the Comey fans out there was to be way too verbal and way too vocal attacking the Attorney General Barr's decision on the Flynn case.
Because that says, hey, we don't consider anything we did wrong at all, and we'd do it all again tomorrow, and we'd double down.
Well, that means they need to be purged out of positions of power.
They need to identify those people.
What we need is mass firings, mass retirements.
Or mass prosecutions.
We need one of the three. Why have to choose one?
Nice to have a triple. Now, so this is the thing too, right, which is the story for a lot of people, particularly on the right, you know, the stand up for the cats in blue law and order types.
The story has been, okay, well, you know, it's a good institution.
There are some bad apples. You know, it's not an institutional issue.
It's not a cultural issue.
It's just, you know, in any organization where there are thousands of people working there, it's going to be a couple of people who are skanky.
And that's but here's the thing, right?
If nothing goes forward, then that is a complete evisceration of the culture, of the length, the breadth, the depth, the height of the entire FBI, maybe even the DOJ, maybe even of Barr.
Because then people are saying, well, OK, if it's just a couple of bad apples, why don't you all pick out the bad apples?
Well, the only way you wouldn't is if they're mostly bad apples.
And I do have, of course, great sympathy for, you know, the hardworking good men and women of the FBI and so on.
But at some point, if the organization is corrupt, that does land on your conscience continuing to work there.
And I guess, are there any levers there that can eject the bad apples without causing the whole damn thing to collapse?
Well, I think there's definitely systematic issues and institutionalized issues.
I represent Robin Gritz, who was one of the reasons why General Flynn was targeted.
She was a longstanding FBI agent.
Was part of the 9-11 team in terms of going after and preventing foreign terror events.
Really had an impeccable record.
Got targeted for political reasons by Andrew McCabe and others.
And she's having to sue.
She ended up being forced out and having to sue to get back some of the rights that she was entitled to.
And she knows a lot of the people that are white hats in the FBI. And the popular view is that at the line level, at the sort of everyday level of special agents, that two-thirds, three-quarters are good and would not go wayward.
But the fear is That if the wayward agents are, as you noted, the bad apples are not taken out, the message that gets sent is twofold.
One is that there's too many bad apples to effectively change the FBI. And it means those who are good apples, those who are trying to do it right, realize that, well, they'll get rewarded a lot easier if they do it wrong.
They no longer have the deterrence because all of them, there's not a single FBI agent that at some point doesn't think, well, if I could just bend the rules here, it's okay because I'm going to get the right out.
I know he's a bad guy. It's the greatest temptation.
It's the number one thing you'll find in wrongful prosecutions of people that turned out innocent is somebody along the way just became convinced that a person was guilty.
They didn't do it out of malevolence in most cases of innocent people being prosecuted.
They did it out of ignorance.
By assuming that they had an undue degree of certainty and self-confidence.
And so that problem becomes a much greater problem.
And then last but not least, if they don't take people out in ways that sends a message, the appearance of impartiality and integrity of the FBI is going to sink dramatically.
In the past, it's only been the left that has been its strongest criticisms.
Now they're going to have a lot of criticisms of people who are otherwise very law enforcement oriented on the political right.
The general rule is once you get to 20% of a jury pool that no longer trusts whoever the law enforcement official is or agency is, that all of a sudden they start seeing 30-40% acquittals and mistrials, which would completely destroy the criminal justice system in terms of its appearance because it's all about a high conviction rate.
So I think Barr does understand that.
My view has always been that Barr will take action because he understands that the appearance of impartiality and integrity is a serious danger.
And so I hope he does, but it will also, once again, be something that I'll believe when I see it happen.
Yeah, no, hope is a dangerous animal to be riding these days.
It gets you places, but it also gets you off a cliff of despair sometimes, wait for these things to happen.
So the last thing I wanted to touch on here, which I find really, really fascinating, is seeing all the people on the left suddenly accepting that just because somebody copped a guilty plea, that means absolutely 100% certain that they did it.
Now, boy, I mean, we know all of the reasons why somebody might cop a guilty plea.
It's not verified, but somebody tweeted at me on Twitter.
They said, oh, I spent a summer once working in a prosecutor's office, and all they kept doing was telling the criminals, well, we can let you rot in prison for a year or two until there's a trial, or you can cop a plea and get out in six months.
And jailhouse snitches, bribing people with their own future liberties and so on, and with not having to spend all the money on a trial, the stress of a trial and so on.
Let's go through, if you could, all of the reasons why we should be skeptical even of a guilty plea and all of the factors that can influence people that way.
Absolutely. So the two most unreliable forms of evidence, number two is eyewitness testimony, and number one is confessors.
And the reason is there's usually a two-told trick to false confessions.
And it's well-documented.
I think the movie is called Under Suspicion with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman.
And throughout the movie, you're convinced that this guy really committed the crime and that it's slowly building.
And wow, they got the confession.
And then you find the twist at the end is he was innocent all along.
And you wonder, hold on a second.
How did that just happen?
Well, how it just happened was gaslighting and coercion.
So gaslighting is getting somebody to...
It's from the movie and from the British play.
They made it, I think, four different versions of the movie Gaslight, which was basically convincing somebody something happened that did not happen.
And everybody's experienced this in their own life, where somebody effectively gaslit them and think, oh, geez, I guess I did do that.
I really didn't think about it. Sorry, just to jump in for a sec.
We all have memories from our early lives where we're like, I wonder if I was too young to remember that or what?
I just heard the story so many times or I had a couple of dreams.
There are things particularly early in your life that you might say happened.
Maybe you'd find out later they didn't.
It was just a story. So we've all experienced that to one degree or another, I think.
Oh, exactly. You have different versions of deja vu.
So basically, memory recall is always problematic.
So the way in which you get false confessions is somebody gaslights them into believing something happened that didn't happen.
Their memory recall confuses.
They feel guilty or ashamed about one thing.
And so they say they did something else that they actually didn't do.
But there's a guilt shifting process that takes place.
And the other third one is coercion.
So here, General Flynn had all three.
So they gaslit him by denying him information and intel.
They basically gave him a memory recall test on the fly that didn't appear to be consequential at the time.
They didn't tell him it was part of an investigation.
They appeared they feigned to be his allies.
They didn't tell him if he if he didn't recall things right, it would be considered a crime.
Nothing like that. So it was just, you know, passing somebody in the hallway saying, hey, what did this happen?
Do you remember? Oh, OK, I think it was this, this or that that kind of thing.
And then all of a sudden coming back and saying, oh, you actually lied to me and I'm not going to call it a crime.
So problem one was the way in which the interview was done made it so that Flynn was unlikely to have good memory recall of what the conversation was.
Number two was they denied him the actual notes and didn't do a recording, of course, which is by itself problematic, but denied him the actual notes so he didn't know what it was he had actually said, just their version of what he had said.
So that's the gaslighting that's taking place.
And then, of course, third was the coercion We're going to go after your son right after he had his own son.
So your grandson is not going to have paternal custodial access to his own father because we're going to go after and see whether he dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's right in the heavily regulatory world of lobbying in Washington, D.C. Where anything can be made into a crime on a given day.
And that's why he pled.
And then they did that off the books to try to hide it from the court.
So it's entirely the use, all of the problems of false confessions were present with General Flynn.
And that's why when he finally got the notes, he saw that in fact he hadn't lied.
That he had given his best recollection at the time.
He hadn't said anything that could materially impact their case.
And that's the conclusion of the Justice Department yesterday.
In reviewing the actual original notes and records, they said, it does not appear to us that there is evidence that General Flynn even lied at all.
Well, and that was, of course, the opinion of some of the FBI agents at the time.
Yes, it was. Who said that they didn't think it was significant.
And let's just – one last quick question.
Look at me running out of lawyer's time.
But the first set of lawyers that he had seemed to be getting roundly eviscerated in general circles.
And the more people have legal knowledge, the more eviscerated these first lawyers seem to be.
What's your opinion of the first round of, yeah, you really should take this plea or you really should confess or whatever?
How actionable do you think it is going to be for him to circle back and say, hmm, that really wasn't the very best advice I could have gotten?
Oh, no doubt about that.
And I think there's several remedies he might be able to seek.
My view is that the Covington firm was conflicted.
They had major problems.
They themselves were going to be put under investigation based on all of the regulatory activities because they had been his regulatory counsel and his son's regulatory counsel as well in part.
So given that, they were in major conflicted range.
Then you add to that, they have people like Eric Holder at Covington.
And if you look at the timing of this deal, I don't think it was all necessarily pure intentions on Barr's part.
Yesterday, the judge had ordered, actually two days ago, the judge had ordered Covington to turn over a bunch more files and to sit down and talk with Sidney Powell to negotiate that process.
Including, apparently, conversations and communications that Eric Holder, now a partner at Covington, might have made while they were representing General Flynn.
So my guess is there was a lot more embarrassing intel and information to come out about the Justice Department, about Obama officials, about Eric Holder, the former Attorney General for Obama.
And that may explain the timing, because it seems like this memorandum had already been written maybe a week or two ago.
Please stop digging. There are more bodies down there.
Please stop digging. Exactly.
I think that's a large part of what took place.
So I think that what that tells me is the Covington firm is sitting on even more dirt.
And so I think I publicly encourage General Flynn to at least get his fees back, make Covington write a big fat check right back to him.
So that he's not out much of the money, number one.
And number two, that could afford him discovery into what some of those files say.
And so that would be another option.
Wait for the full dismissal to happen.
But after that, I think you should go after them.
It's the nature. A lot of these big institutional law firms really represent the big institutions, not the individuals.
Even when they're supposed to be representing the individuals.
What I tell people all the time, former federal prosecutors, unfortunately, are not a reliable source of very effective defense work because it's not like they're going to go in there and start accusing all of their old friends and allies of a bunch of government misconduct.
That ain't happening. Instead, they tend to facilitate the government's misconduct by doing a Star Chamber Inquisition-like coercion of confession of their own client after they've taken a lot of money from the client.
So that's my general view, and what happened with General Flynn was just an extreme version of that.
Okay, so let's give me please your top couple of orders if you're sitting in Barr's chair, and you have the full weight, power, might, and majesty of the DOJ behind you.
What would you want to see happen over the next couple of weeks?
A dismissal or pardon of Roger Stone's case, a commutation of Paul Manafort's case, then particularly an indictment of James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strosek.
Those are the three worst actors in this bunch.
You know, there's others involved at different levels, complicit, some line prosecutors who probably should be referred for ethics investigations or should be told to resign under threat of that.
But, you know, start with some big names that really get people's attention that this was a deeply problematic manner.
They handled this case and that, in fact, they're real remedies and real consequences for acting like a modern day J. Edgar Hoover.
Without the flowery dresses.
All right.
Well, thanks.
Always a great pleasure to chat.
Thank you for breaking it down.
Can you just please remind people where to find you on the Web should they need your services? - Sure, BarnesLawLLP as in Peter.com.
Yeah, that's the main place.
And they can find me while I'm still alive on Twitter at Barnes underscore Law.
Every day we cross our fingers.
All right. Thanks, Steve. It was a real great pleasure to chat.
I'll talk to you soon. Absolutely.
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