Federal Judge Usurps Prosecutors' Authority in Get-Flynn Scheme

Judicial tyranny is as American
as apple pie. Above is Ben Shahn’s
The Passion of Sacco and Vansetti
"Sacco and Vanzetti lie in coffins; in
foreground in front of a colonnaded
neoclassical courthouse (image left).
On the porch behind them hangs a
portrait of the infamous trial judge,
Webster Thayer. Towering over
Sacco and Vanzetti are members of
 the committee that reviewed
convictions: Samuel Stratton, MIT
pres; Lawrence Lowell, Harvard
pres and Robert Grant, retired
judge," (Kuykendall)

Emmet Sullivan Wants to Be Judge, Prosecutor, Pundit and Political Strategist

Update: Daniel Payne reports:

"An federal appeals court Thursday accepted Michael Flynn's request to have the district judge overseeing his case removed and has ordered that judge to explain why he has gone to such great lengths to avoid the Justice Department's request to dismiss the case."

A special three-judge panel has been appointed to review the matter. A June 1 deadline has been set to respond to the request."

"The request, filed on Tuesday by Flynn's legal team, asked the appeals court to remove Judge Emmett Sullivan from the case, claiming the judge was biased against the defendant."
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 U.S. Dist Judge Emmet Sullivan is trying to reprise the role of a tyrannical judiciary in American criminal law litigation: Convict the defendant of something, anything, by any means necessary.

U.S. government prosecutors moved to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn on May 7, 2020 in an act of prosecutorial discretion that used to draw plaudits from the liberal legal establishment.

Sullivan's response — soliciting outside briefs in opposition to the dismissal; appointing another party in place of the prosecutor; and stalling until still another prosecutor can be appointed — has provoked outrage, but not among the Democratic-leaning prosecutors and corporate media.

This seems confusing. Judges are supposed to be impartial in presiding over criminal cases.

No more. And the Democratic Party and former prosecutors are either silent or applaud Sullivan as he attempts to imprison an innocent man for the rest of his life.

Writes Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Last Thursday, the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to dismiss the prosecution of Flynn based, in part, on newly discovered documents revealing that the conduct of the FBI, under the leadership of Director James Comey and his now-disgraced Deputy Andrew McCabe (who himself was forced to leave the Bureau after being caught lying to agents), was improper and motivated by corrupt objectives. That motion prompted histrionic howls of outrage from the same political officials and their media allies who have spent the last three years pushing maximalist Russiagate conspiracy theories. ...

More disturbingly, liberals and Democrats — as part of their movement toward venerating these security state agencies — have completely jettisoned long-standing, core principles about the criminal justice system, including questioning whether lying to the FBI should be a crime at all and recognizing that innocent people are often forced to plead guilty — in order to justify both the Flynn prosecution and the broader Mueller probe.

But the most critical reason to delve deeply into this case is that it reveals one the most dangerous abuses of power a democracy can suffer: The powers of the CIA, FBI, and NSA were blatantly and repeatedly abused to manipulate election outcomes and achieve political advantage.

No civil libertarian Democrats, if such a thing still exists, has registered objection as Sullivan looked to sympathetic retired jurists and intelligence officials to take up his cause.

Can I say, for the record, how appalling it is that Flynn’s constitutional rights are now up for a referendum

this whole process has been bastardized

— ThunderB, SicSemperTyrannis (@ThunderB) May 18, 2020

Even the New York Times is forced to admit Emmet Sullivan's work against Michael Flynn is improper and that the DoJ retains prosecutorial authority. Deep into a startlingly biased Times analysis, Charlie Savage and Sharon LaFraniere write:

Either way, the department is arguing that Judge Sullivan has little choice but to drop the case. A 2016 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which oversee his district, said that the judiciary 'generally lacks authority to second-guess' executive branch decisions about whether to charge or drop a case.

See also UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, v. FOKKER SERVICES B.V., APPELLANT (No. 15-3016, 15-3017), Judge Sri Srinivasa: "The Constitution allocates primacy in criminal charging decisions to the Executive Branch. The Executive’s charging authority embraces decisions about whether to initiate charges, whom to prosecute, which charges to bring, and whether to dismiss charges once brought. It has long been settled that the Judiciary generally lacks authority to second-guess those Executive determinations, much less to impose its own charging preferences."

Sullivan had given hints of his bias against Flynn, musing in open court in Dec 2018 that Flynn committed "treason," though no such charges were filed or contemplated in the record. (The Guardian).