But whatever the “goal” may have been in setting up Flynn, justice was not one of them.

My Occam's Razor for bad outcomes arising from government action is that the bad result will be primarily due to ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence. A secondary cause will be sloppy tactical corruption. Third will be intentional corruption and a distant fourth will involve malevolent intent.

It is easy to make bad government actions appear to be evil when in fact they are usually and mostly ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and sloppy corruption.

Most news organizations and opinion pieces invert that pyramid. Every minor failing is due to malevolence and intentional corruption. There are a lot more clicks for a news story about a backroom deal cheating taxpayers of millions than there are for a story about the mayor charging her personal living expenses to her mayoral American Express account.

I think the facts support my Occam's Razor.

But just because there are probabilities to causes doesn't mean that those probabilities always play out.

The entire Russia Collusion Hoax seemed a dicey proposition from the beginning but it took three years to reveal that in fact there was no fire and no smoke. It was an entirely malevolent investigation with no evidentiary basis. A fact still not accepted in many quarters.

The other one for the same period seemed at the time as more amenable to the ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence explanation - the General Michael Flynn prosecution. Perhaps the FBI erred a little bit but there must be some real underlying crime.

With the further revelations this week that the FBI intentionally sought out to entrap a political figure because he was a political figure and in the absence of any suggested crime is pretty shocking. My Occam's Razor remains true but in this case clearly the bad government outcome was entirely due to malevolent intent and not due to careless ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence.

From Michael Flynn case should be dismissed to preserve justice by Jonathan Turley. The whole thing is worth reading.

Previously undisclosed documents in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn offer us a chilling blueprint on how top FBI officials not only sought to entrap the former White House aide but sought to do so on such blatantly unconstitutional and manufactured grounds.

These new documents further undermine the view of both the legitimacy and motivations of those investigations under former FBI director James Comey. For all of those who have long seen a concerted effort within the Justice Department to target the Trump administration, the fragments will read like a Dead Sea Scrolls version of a “deep state” conspiracy.

One note reflects discussions within the FBI shortly after the 2016 election on how to entrap Flynn in an interview concerning his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. According to Fox News, the note was written by the former FBI head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, after a meeting with Comey and his deputy director, Andrew McCabe.


The note states, “What is our goal? Truth and admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” This may have expressed an honest question over the motivation behind this targeting of Flynn, a decision for which Comey later publicly took credit when he had told an audience that he decided he could “get away” with sending “a couple guys over” to the White House to set up Flynn and make the case.

The new documents also explore how the Justice Department could get Flynn to admit breaking the Logan Act, a law that dates back to from 1799 which makes it a crime for a citizen to intervene in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. It has never been used to convict a citizen and is widely viewed as flagrantly unconstitutional.

In his role as the national security adviser to the president elect, there was nothing illegal in Flynn meeting with Kislyak. To use this abusive law here was utterly absurd, although other figures such as former acting Attorney General Sally Yates also raised it. Nevertheless, the FBI had latched onto this abusive law to target the retired Army lieutenant general.

[snip]

Flynn was never charged with treason or with being a foreign agent. But when Sullivan menacingly asked if he wanted a sentence then and there, Flynn wisely passed. It is a record that truly shocks the conscience. While rare, it is still possible for the district court to right this wrong since Flynn has not been sentenced. The Justice Department can invite the court to use its inherent supervisory authority to right a wrong of its own making. As the Supreme Court made clear in 1932, “universal sense of justice” is a stake in such cases. It is the “duty of the court to stop the prosecution in the interest of the government itself to protect it from the illegal conduct of its officers and to preserve the purity of its courts.”


Flynn was a useful tool for everyone and everything but justice. Mueller had ignored the view of the investigators and coerced Flynn to plead to a crime he did not commit to gain damaging testimony against Trump and his associates that Flynn did not have. The media covered Flynn to report the flawed theory of Russia collusion and to foster the view that some sort of criminal conspiracy was being uncovered by Mueller. Even the federal judge used Flynn to rail against what he saw as a treasonous plot. What is left in the wake of the prosecution is an utter travesty of justice.

Justice demands a dismissal of his prosecution. But whatever the “goal” may have been in setting up Flynn, justice was not one of them.