dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

In Appellate Brief, DOJ Unloads On Behavior Of Rogue Judge In Flynn Case

In its brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., the Department of Justice eviscerated the arguments of the anti-Flynn federal judge who has refused to dismiss the unlawful charges against Michael Flynn.

The Department of Justice on Monday unloaded on the antics of the rogue federal judge overseeing the Michael Flynn trial, accusing him of usurping the constitutional authority of the executive branch to make prosecutorial decisions and ignoring both statutory law and federal court precedent requiring him to dismiss the case against Flynn.

After Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to grant the unopposed DOJ motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn after the government unearthed and relevant reams of evidence that the government had abused its power and unlawfully targeted Flynn, Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell filed a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia asking it to order the trial court to dismiss the charges against Flynn. The appellate court ordered Sullivan to respond by close of business on June 1 and invited DOJ to file its own response as well.

In a sign of how important DOJ views the underlying constitutional issues in the case, the formal brief to the appellate court wasn’t just signed by the line attorney managing the government’s case. Instead, it was signed by Noel J. Francisco, the Solicitor General of the United States who is tasked with representing the U.S. government in the most important appellate cases across the country; Brian A. Benczkowski, the Assistant Attorney General and head of DOJ’s entire criminal division; Deputy Solicitors General Jeffrey B. Wall and Eric J. Feigin; assistants to the Solicitor General Frederick Liu and Vivek Suri; Michael R. Sherwin, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Kenneth C. Kohl, the acting Principal Assistant United States Attorney for D.C.; and Jocelyn S. Ballantine, the line prosecutor handling the Flynn case at trial.

“The Constitution vests in the Executive Branch the power to decide when—and when not—to prosecute potential crimes,” DOJ argued in its brief. Rules of federal criminal procedure, cited by Sullivan in support of his gambit to appoint himself both judge and prosecutor in the inquisition against Flynn, “do[] not authorize a court to stand in the way of a dismissal the defendant does not oppose, and any other reading of [those rules] would violate both Article II and Article III” of the constitution, DOJ wrote.

“Nor, under the circumstances of this case, may the district court assume the role of prosecutor and initiate criminal charges of its own,” the brief continued. “Instead of inviting further proceedings the court should have granted the government’s motion to dismiss.”

In their brief to the appellate court detailing the facts of the Flynn case, Francisco and the other DOJ attorneys noted that prior to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) ambush interview of Flynn on January 24, 2017, “the FBI identified no ‘derogatory information’ about petitioner and determined that he ‘was no longer a viable candidate’ for investigation.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/01/in-appellate-brief-doj-unloads-on-behavior-of-rogue-judge-in-flynn-case/