We're Sure Michael Flynn's Clown Lawyer Blew Up His Cooperation Agreement For Very Good Reason

Pardon me? (GET IT?)

Let's be clear: We knew when disgraced former National Security Adviser and literal actual foreign agent Michael Flynn fired his normal lawyers and hired Sidney Powell, a Fox News TV clown lawyer with a Twitter feed that could cause emoji seizures, that things were about to get weird. Flynn is not far off from his sentencing for lying to the feds, but he was supposedly just really wanting to cooperate with the government a whole lot more, especially as the star witness this summer in the trial against his former business partner Bijan Rafiekian. Presumably Flynn was doing this so that the judge on his case, Emmet Sullivan, who has been   so amused by Flynn's "I WUZ FRAMED!" hijinks up to this point, would not lock him up in Guantanamo as a joke, and then pull him out of there in 30 years, so that he might begin his real sentence in a normal federal prison.

To be clear, this is a Three-Star Twitter clown lawyer who tweets things like this:

.@GenFlynn should be exonerated! No doubt #Mueller team & #FBI still hiding evidence that exonerates him. No eviden… https: //t.co/ZMyuRfzWoT

— Sidney Powell 🇺🇸⭐⭐⭐ (@Sidney Powell 🇺🇸⭐⭐⭐) 1554485541.0 

And now Sidney Powell, J.D., LL.M., W.T.F., has blown up Flynn's cooperation agreement, and we are all left to ask WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?

Rafiekian, Flynn's Iranian-American business partner who was also on the Trump transition team, was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) a while back for conspiracy, failure to register as a foreign agent for Turkey, and a whole bunch of lying. You'll remember that Flynn was also hot 'n' heavy with the Turks during the 2016 campaign , going so far as to publish an op-ed in The Hill on election day , about how it was absolutely necessary that we kidnap this exiled cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who has been happily living in Pennsylvania for years, and send him back to Turkey so Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could have him killed as punishment for starting an alleged coup against his government (that Gülen says he actually did not start). That op-ed appeared to really have (mostly) been ghostwritten by Rafiekian, who also goes by Bijan Kian, as the culmination of their big Turkey project.

Somehow, Flynn was not indicted as a co-conspirator, even though the Rafiekian indictment suggests Flynn and Rafiekian were about equally as deep in the foreign agent criming. We guess he was just really cooperating with the government so bigly , so they decided to let the foreign agent stuff slide.

But now everything's changing, and nobody has a fuckin' clue why. In a series of newly unsealed filings from last week, we have learned the following things:

Firstly, Michael Flynn will not be the government's star witness against his former business partner, because the feds say the stories he's now telling are bullshit.

Prosecutors say they don't buy Flynn's new story about why his (retroactive!) Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing ended up being full of lies (retroactively!) that concealed how his work was for the specific benefit of Turkey's government. In Flynn's original plea agreement and statement of offense, he confirmed that he lied in that filing.

But now (but now!) Flynn's new explanation is that any lies in those filings -- the lies he admitted telling -- were actually his old lawyers' fault, so please do not be blaming him!

A court filing from Rafiekian's attorneys includes an email that Assistant U.S. Attorney James P. Gillis ended by saying prosecutors "do not necessarily agree" with Flynn's "characterizations" of how he came to make an inaccurate filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act for an influence campaign that benefited the Turkish government. According to the email, Flynn says he did not provide false information to his attorneys at the time, did not read the FARA filing before signing it and was not aware that it contained falsehoods.

In their filing, Rafiekian's lawyers say they "interpreted the email's final sentence as a euphemism for, 'we've concluded [Flynn] is lying.'"

But he didn't mean to, Your Honor, HONEST! Here is where Flynn's special wingnut Sidney Powell says in a new filing that Flynn understands now that his (retroactive!) FARA filing was bullshit, but that is because of "the benefit of hindsight," and not because he thought he was yakking out fibs at the time , even though he admitted to that very thing months ago:

Poor thing just had a confuse, we guess -- kind of like us after trying to parse what Powell's words mean in that particular order, and whether she is in fact illiterate. We think they are actually asserting with a straight face that Flynn and Rafiekian thought they were working for this Dutch company Inovo BV -- led by a Dutch-Turkish guy named Ekim Alptekin, who is also under indictment in this case, but lives in a foreign land, so he's not been nabbed yet -- that really wanted them to help run a campaign against a Turkish cleric for the benefit of the Turkish government, which hates that cleric, but it NEVER OCCURRED TO THEM that they might be doing this for Turkey . He was a dupe! He was a patsy! Anyway, now Michael Flynn understands better, please make him national security adviser again.

Here is the government saying WAIT, WHAT THE HELL, and confirming that this new Flynn story arose after Flynn fired his old lawyers from the firm of Covington & Burling, and hired his new lawyer, from the firm of You've Gotta Be & Fucking Kidding Me:

And now, Sidney Powell says in the filings that the government is trying to force her sweet and innocent client to tell these vicious lies about his previous lies:

"The prosecutors have been adamant Mr. Flynn testify that he authorized filing the FARA form knowing and intending that it contain false statements," Powell wrote. "Mr. Flynn cannot give that testimony because it is not true."

So now we guess we've gone from Flynn claiming HE WUZ FRAMED by FBI agents who asked him questions about his secret sanctions talk with the Russian ambassador and expected honest answers, to Flynn claiming HE WUZ FRAMED by his old lawyers, who used age-old wizard trickery to fool him into lying about his Turkish foreign agent work in his retroactive FARA filing. Oh yes and also HE WUZ FRAMED, in advance, by the mean government what is holding him down and forcing him to lie. All of this makes sense.

We should note that now the government is calling Flynn a co-conspirator, and plans to use his out-of-court statements against him:

Cooperation agreement: 'SPLODED!

But don't worry, y'all! Sidney Powell says Flynn is still cooperating! Because that sounds accurate!

So basically what's happened here is that Sidney Powell has fucked the prosecutors in the Rafiekian case, and all over Flynn's FARA violation, and nobody knows why. The only thing we can really think of is that this is all intended for an audience of one, in order to connivingly fool the government into doing a witch hunt to Michael Flynn and throwing him in the slammer, at which point Donald Trump will obviously pardon Flynn out of the goodness of his heart. And if that's the plan, that's risky , because Flynn and Sidney Powell might be huffing paint and unaware of this, but Donald Trump doesn't actually care about anybody but himself. 

By the by, Judge Emmet Sullivan -- you know, the one who's set to sentence Flynn, who is just ETERNALLY amused by all of this -- would like to know what the fuck is going on here, please and thanks, and has demanded in a minute order that he be updated by this afternoon. He will not be extending his deadline.

On July 9, 2019, Judge [Anthony] Trenga issued an Order unsealing certain court records [...] including the following: (1) the government's "Notice of Correction to the Record," (2) Mr. Flynn's "Memorandum Opposing Coconspirator Designation of Non-Party Witness Michael T. Flynn," and (3) Mr. Bijan Rafiekian's "Memorandum Regarding Notice of Correction to the Record." [...]The government is ORDERED to file a submission to this Court by no later than 5: 00 PM on July 10, 2019, explaining how the unsealed records in United States v. Rafiekian will impact the proceedings before this Court. Mr. Flynn is ORDERED to file his response to the government's submission by no later than 5:00 PM on July 11, 2019. The Court will not extend these filing deadlines.

Yeah, he's in a good mood.

Keep prayin' for that pardon, Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell!

In the meantime, Wonkette will keep praying our own little prayer.

 
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[ Washington Post / Politico / filings / Susan Simpson on Twitte r]

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