Category Archives: Constitution

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 30, 2020: 

A majority of justices on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, most of them appointed by Democrat presidents, decided on Thursday to ignore Michael Flynn’s attorney’s demand to let the court’s prior ruling by a three-judge panel stand.

In response to District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s appeal of that ruling, Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, wrote:

The district court has hijacked and extended prosecution for almost three months for its own purposes.…

 

To allow Judge Sullivan to delay and generate [additional] litigation against a criminal defendant is unconstitutional. [The] Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case….

 

This Court should deny rehearing and issue with prejudice [so that Sullivan cannot refile] instanter [immediately].

 

No federal court has countenanced rehearing of an [order to dismiss] on petition by a district judge.

 

Judge Sullivan has no cognizable interest in the case. Rehearing should be denied because the [three-judge] panel properly applied the long-standing use of [a demand to dismiss] to which General Flynn is clearly entitled….

 

Rehearing is not warranted … because there is no conflict with any decision.

Powell likened the charade to a baseball game: “In lay terms, umpires don’t get to swing bats or run bases; they suffer no harm when one team wins and the other loses…. The umpire cannot force the teams to play extra innings after the game is over. He, the players, and the spectators need to go home and turn off the floodlights.”

On Thursday, the appeals court decided to leave the floodlights lights on:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 20, 2020: 

It’s been 10 weeks since the government asked Judge Sullivan to dismiss its case against President Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and still the case drags on.

On Monday Flynn’s attorney, Sydney Powell (whom The New American has characterized as a “legal lioness” and a “tigress”) blew her cork. On July 9 Judge Emmet Sullivan asked the circuit court to convene “en banc” (all 12 judges) to reconsider the court’s three-judge panel’s ruling that Sullivan must dismiss the case.

Sydney, in a 19-page response to Sullivan’s request for a full court hearing, concluded:

The district court [Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court] has hijacked and extended prosecution for almost three months for its [his] own purposes.… This Court should deny rehearing and issue [the demand that Sullivan dismiss the government’s case against Flynn] with prejudice [so that Sullivan cannot refile] instanter [immediately].

She was hopping mad:

No federal court has countenanced rehearing of an [order to dismiss] on petition by a district judge.

 

Judge Sullivan has no cognizable [legitimate] interest in the case. Rehearing should be denied because the [three-judge] panel properly applied the long-standing use of [a demand to dismiss] to which General Flynn is clearly entitled….

 

Rehearing is not warranted … because there is no conflict with any decision.

Sullivan is not only out of line but exceeds his constitutional authority, declared Powell:

The district court exceeded its constitutional authority for appointing [a friend, former Judge John Gleeson] to work against General Flynn after the parties [Flynn and the government] agreed to dismissal.

 

The Constitution and all precedent apply … mandate dismissal.

The deliberate delay in issuing dismissal is damaging Flynn further:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, June 24, 2020: 

Michael Flynn was President Trump’s chosen National Security Advisor. Before Trump took office, Flynn talked to Russian diplomats to try to calm an escalating international situation. Obama-era FBI officials who were then investigating Democratic claims that Trump was aided in his election by Russia (despite no proof of such collusion) had tapped Flynn’s phone and heard his entire conversation with them.

Nothing was uttered in Flynn’s conversation with the Russians that suggested any involvement of the Russians with Trump’s election, yet afterward FBI agents entrapped Flynn into saying something about the conversation that was untrue, and charged him with lying to the FBI — all the while knowing that Flynn was guilty of nothing. Flynn originally accepted a plea deal saying that he said something misleading and was sentenced to prison (though Democrats lie under oath almost constantly and don’t get charged with anything). When Flynn got new legal representation and tried to take back his plea deal, it was learned that the DOJ and FBI had always known that Flynn was innocent of wrongdoing, yet he was questioned and entrapped anyway.

Rightly, the DOJ decided to drop the charges against Flynn, but District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan wouldn’t allow the charges to be dropped, and he assigned a prosecutor of his own to keep the case going, saying that the law said that it was up to the court to decide whether to drop charges or not — not up to the DOJ. Now a higher court has told Sullivan point blank, he was wrong. The order from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan was terse:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 4, 2020: 

When Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton was allowed to publish an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday supporting President Trump’s suggestion that he might have to use the Insurrection Act to quell Antifa-led riots, some members of the Times staff lost their minds.

His op-ed was reason itself: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” wrote Cotton, adding that while “nihilist criminals” were simply “out for loot and the thrill of destruction … cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa [were] infiltrating protest marches to exploit [George] Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.”

When those protest marches exceed local authorities’ ability to maintain order, wrote Cotton, “it’s … time to support local law enforcement with federal authority.… The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military” to quell the riots and restore order. Cotton reminded his readers that the federal government “has a constitutional duty to the states to ‘protect each of them from domestic violence.’”

In normal times, local law enforcement is more than able to keep the peace and restore order when necessary. “But,” wrote Cotton, “in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed.”

The backlash from Times staffers was immediate. Charlie Warzel, an opinion writer for the Times, tweeted, “I feel compelled to say that I disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values.” Other Times sympathizers such as freelance writer Thor Benson agreed: “I know a lot of New York Times employees feel like they can’t speak out right now, so I’ll happily say what needs to be said: there should be resignations.”

Former Times staffers weighed in as well. Tweeted Sewell Chan, a former op-ed writer for the Times, “I am reluctant to weigh in on my former alma mater. But the decision to publish Senator Tom Cotton’s [piece] calling for troop deployments to quell unrest falls short of sound journalistic practice.”

And then there is Roxanne Gay, a contributing writer for the Times, who totally lost it. She tweeted, “Running this puts black NY Times writers, editors and other staff in danger.” How, exactly, was missing from her tweet. How did Cotton’s carefully constructed and reasonable support for a possible future move by the president to use his authority under the Insurrection Act in the event it became clear that states or local municipalities couldn’t maintain order and keep the peace work to threaten black writers and editors at the Times? She didn’t explain.

Gay went on: