Ex-Trump advisor Michael Flynn faces skeptical appeals court

A lawyer for former national security advisor Michael Flynn on Friday called his prosecution a “travesty of justice,” but a federal appeals court appeared skeptical of her request that it force a lower court judge to dismiss the case.

Sidney Powell, Flynn’ lawyer, told the appeals court that the case’s judge does not have the power to avoid granting the dismissal, as the Justice Department has asked him to do despite Flynn pleading guilty to lying to FBI agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat before President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Powell also said U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan lacks authority to ask an outside lawyer to make legal arguments against that request, as the judge has done.

“It cannot go on any longer,” Powell told a three-judge panel at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

“There is nothing further for the court to do,” she added, during a hearing that lasted nearly two hours, and was conducted over remote audio links due the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s a travesty of justice that this man has been dragged through” a three-year court ordeal on a case that was “absolutely concocted,” Powell said of Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who briefly served as Trump’s first national security advisor.

But members of the appellate panel appeared skeptical that they should intervene in the case now, as Powell has asked, before Sullivan has actually ruled on the dismissal request.

The appellate judge also questioned the idea that a federal judge does not have the power to either conduct an independent inquiry of prosecutors’ decision to drop a case, or to deny such a request.

One judge on the appeals panel asked several times why the appellate court could not just wait for Sullivan to rule on the dismissal request, and then review the case, if needed.

 Sullivan has already proposed a hearing schedule for Flynn and the DOJ to  argue their points.

Powell said that if the appeals court allowed Sullivan to conduct hearings in federal district court in Washington on the dismissal motion, “We would simply be delaying the inevitable.”

She cited the already high legal costs for Flynn in fighting the case.

The Justice Department, in a bombshell and highly unusual motion, last month asked Sullivan to toss out the case, arguing that a review of the investigation found that Flynn should not have been questioned by the FBI or charged with lying to federal agents. The department also said that potentially exculpatory evidence had been withheld from Flynn’s lawyers.

Sullivan, who had been on track to sentencing Flynn, so far has not granted the Justice Department’s request.

Instead, he appointed a former federal judge, the attorney John Gleeson, to make legal arguments for why the dismissal should not be granted.

Gleeson also was tasked with addressing the question of whether to hold Flynn in criminal contempt of court for having twice admitted under oath to criminal conduct that he now claims he did not commit.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/former-trump-advisor-michael-flynn-makes-appeals-court-arguments.html