Impeachment and a bunch of other stuff
Michael Flynn tries to get his guilty plea thrown out in Russia investigation
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-07/former-trump-advisor-seeks-to-get-guilty-plea-thrown-out
WASHINGTON — Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security advisor, is seeking to have his guilty plea thrown out for lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation — a risky legal strategy that could irritate the federal judge who will sentence him next month.
In seeking to dismiss the case, Flynn’s lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to hold prosecutors in contempt of court for withholding evidence. They also have embraced what appear to be unrelated conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies to discredit federal investigators.
Legal experts said it is clear from court filings that the real audience for Flynn’s moves is not Sullivan, a no-nonsense judge who has little patience for defendants seeking to duck responsibility for their crimes. It is the president who named Flynn national security advisor after the 2016 election — and then sacked him after less than a month on the job.
“Flynn is playing to Trump,” said James Cohen, a law professor at Fordham University in New York. “You don’t evaluate these arguments based on them making sense. You evaluate them on the basis of whom they are making happy. That would be Trump. Flynn wants a pardon.”
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Roger Stone trial set to turn to alleged witness threats, contacts with Trump campaign about WikiLeaks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/roger-stone-trial-set-to-turn-to-alleged-witness-threats-contacts-with-trump-campaign-about-wikileaks/2019/11/08/156e0854-01b0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html
Former radio show host Randy Credico returned to the witness stand Friday in the trial of Roger Stone, who is accused of lying to Congress and then threatening Credico not to tell lawmakers the truth about their conversations.
Jurors have seen Stone’s words in texts and emails, but Credico told them firsthand that he felt that when Stone used a Godfather II movie reference with him he was trying to persuade Credico to mislead Congress by claiming not to recall certain information.
At the time, Stone was trying to learn more about hacked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign that might tank her run against then-candidate Donald Trump. The emails were stolen by Russian agents and shared with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which released them at critical points in the 2016 election cycle, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say Stone, a longtime friend of then-candidate Donald Trump, lied to protect the president when lawmakers questioned Stone in 2017 about what he’d done during the campaign.
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