NOTE:  I drafted this post at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, immediately following the initial reports out of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.  This morning many of the sentiments expressed below were raised by legal analysts, especially Joyce Vance, former federal district attorney in Alabama, and Chuck Rosenberg, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

They call it Occam’s Razor because, among other things, it cuts through the bull**it!  Too bad journalists and pundits cannot do the same.

With all the coverage of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s sentencing hearing for Michael Flynn, the media once again missed the obvious.  Clearly, Sullivan was angry for the last minute crapola offered by Flynn’s attorneys that a three-star general would not know lying to the FBI was a crime unless he had been explicitly reminded of it by his interviewers.  But that hardly justifies Sullivan’s characterization of Flynn’s behavior.

All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the National Security Adviser* to the President of the United States. That undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably you sold your country out…I am not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense.

And even though Judge Sullivan has warned no one should read too much into it, he asked prosecutors, “Could he have been charged with treason?”

On MSNBC and CNN, pundits and legal analysts seemed shocked that a judge would stray so far from a joint recommendation that the defendant’s guilty plea and subsequent cooperation be rewarded with no jail time.  But here’s the obvious point every one of them missed.  Judge Sullivan has seen an un-redacted version of all the filings and supporting documentation.  You don’t tell someone “you sold out your country” simply for lying to the FBI.  While he backed off the term “treason,” he did not yield on his assessment that Flynn had betrayed the United States.

Semantics aside, there is only one reason Judge Sullivan would raise the points he did.  Even if Flynn’s actions do not meet the formal definition of “treason,” when faced with the choice of supporting sanctions against Russia imposed by the sitting president–Barack Obama–or sending a message to Vladimir Putin they would be lifted, he chose the latter.  He sided with a foreign adversary who had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.  Call it what you will, but it was both wrong and unprecedented.

The bigger question is whether Judge Sullivan is setting the stage for the Mueller report.  One of the  things we know from Flynn’s guilty plea is he placed several calls to Mar-a-Lago on or about December 29, 2016, the day he told Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to advise Putin not to overreact to newly imposed sanctions.  If and when we find out which members of the transition team were on the other end of those calls, from Sullivan’s perspective, we might be looking at a conspiracy to sell out the country.

Justice may be blind, but judges are neither blind nor deaf.  More importantly, they are human.  And it does not take a rocket scientist to realize officers of the court can only tolerate attacks on their domain for so long without fighting back.  I am willing to bet the farm, any member of the transition team who talked to Flynn during this period is hoping they never have to face Emmet Sullivan in court.

Footnote:  It is just a matter of time before Donald Trump tweets something about Judge Sullivan.  After all he is an African-American appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by Bill Clinton.  In the spirit of the holiday season, even I am willing to do whatever I can to stop Twitter-Man from making a fool of himself.  Psst, Donald, he was first appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1984 by Ronald Reagan and elevated to the D.C. Court of Appeals in 1992 by George H. W. Bush.  Not holding my breath he will make the connection.

*Sullivan later corrected himself.  Flynn was not yet national security advisor when he talked to Kislyak about U.S. sanctions.  However, Trump had publicly announced Flynn was his choice for the position.

POSTSCRIPT: The Company You Keep

How did some Trump supporters respond to Judge Sullivan’s rebuke.  Here is today’s headline in the neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer, whose editor Andrew Anglin celebrated Trump’s election victory with, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor.”

MSNBC and CNN have done a pretty good job in the last 24 hours exposing Fox News for what it is, delusion thinking Sullivan would crush Mueller, not Flynn.  If only they would occasionally share coverage like this and ask viewers if they really want to be associated with these “patriots.”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

This should have been a story about how the wealthy and powerful get away with murder, or at least sex trafficking of minors.  It begins in March 2005 when a 14-year-old girl and her parents tell police the child and a classmate were offered cash to come to the Palm Beach home of Bear Stearns partner Jeffrey Epstein and give him a massage.  The girls claimed they were sexually molested.

In May 2006, Epstein and two associates are charged with multiple counts of “unlawful sex acts with a minor.”  The case is referred by the state attorney to a grand jury.  The grand jury returns an indictment of one count of solicitation of prostitution without mentioning the victim is a minor.

At the request of the Palm Beach police chief, the FBI opens a federal investigation resulting in a 53 page indictment based on testimony from multiple victims from Florida, New York and New Mexico.  The grand jury also subpoenaed Epstein’s computers which had been removed from his residence prior to his arrest.

Fast forward to August 2007. Alexander Acosta, the U.S. attorney at the time, begins negotiations for a plea agreement.  Just in case that name sounds familiar,  Acosta is the current Secretary of Labor appointed by Donald Trump.  As the negotiations begin, Acosta sets aside the subpoena seeking access to Epstein’s computers.  By October, there is a tentative plea agreement which includes three quite unusual provisions.

• The victims are not to be notified of the plea agreement (in violation of the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act).
• The terms of the plea agreement will be permanently sealed.
• All grand jury subpoenas will be cancelled.

The deal is rejected by Epstein’s lawyers and negotiations continue for seven months.  Finally, on June 30, 2008, Epstein pleads guilty to one count of solicitation with a prostitute and one count of solicitation with a minor under the age of 18.  Remember, the girl was a lot under 18.  She was 14 at the time.  Epstein is sentenced to 18 months in prison and required to register in Florida as a convicted sex offender.  He is released five months early and is confined for one year to his Palm Beach home except to commute to his office to conduct business.

In November 2009, one of Epstein’s butlers Alfredo Rodriguez tries to sell his employer’s “black book” with names of hundreds of girls and young women to an undercover FBI agent.  Following his arrest he begins cooperating with authorities at which time it is revealed the location of potentially illegal activities included Epstein’s home in the Virgin Islands.  The victims and “guests” often flew to the site on Epstein’s private jets.  In 2010, as part of a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff’s lawyers obtain the flight logs and passenger manifests.  You would recognize several of the names which I have omitted because, at this time, none have been convicted of any crime although some of the now-grown women who have since filed civil suits against Epstein claim they were raped by individuals who appear on the manifests.

Much of the above is taken from the outstanding investigative reporting by the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown including a November 28, 2018 timeline of the case under the title, “Perversion of Justice.”  If Brown’s reporting is accurate, many of the recent #metoo exposés pale in comparison.  This involves the trafficking of children for sexual purposes and powerful men who used them to satisfy their overactive libidos.

But today, that is not what this story is about.  This morning, from the top of their show at 6:00am, Mika Brzezinki and Joe Scarborough promised an explosive story about Epstein and “what is being called the most lenient sentence in the history of sexual offenses.”  The fact it involves a member of Trump’s cabinet makes it more newsworthy.

A few of the victims have gone public.  Some have settled their civil suits before going to trial.  Would one or more tell their stories?  Had they booked Brown to share how she broke the story?  Finally, someone was giving these women the attention they deserve.

Or so I thought.  It is now 8:40 a.m.  I understand.  There was other news.  41’s funeral. Congressional rebuke of Trump’s version of the Khashoggi murder.  Republican voter fraud in North Carolina.  Republican legislators limiting the power of newly elected Democratic governors in Wisconsin and Michigan.  But did we really need another story comparing Ivanka’s use of personal email to Hillary Clinton?  Or an interview about lessons learned in the mid-terms with the newly elected chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee?

I’m sorry Joe and Mika.  Haven’t these young women been abused enough already?  Did you really need to use them again as teasers to hold your viewers?  SHAME!

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

~Carl Sagan

During my time as a professor at Miami University, once a week I would reserve 10 to 15 minutes for what became known as “Dumb Question Time.”  Students were offered an opportunity to challenge me with any question they always wanted to, but had never asked, a faculty member.  The topics ranged from “Do you have favorite students and does it affect how you grade them?” to “What are your guilty pleasures?”  And it was often the least expected inquiry which resulted in the most insightful conversations.

I thought about “Dumb Question Time” while watching MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber last night.  A scheduled segment was interrupted with “breaking news.”  Ivanka Trump had conducted official government business using a private email account.  After hearing from the reporter who broke the story, Melber turned to Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones David Corn and said:

David, I could ask the question two ways.  I could ask you on the one hand, what do you think is the import of this story?  Or I could ask you, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

In that moment, Melber asked the “dumb question” every other reporter and pundit has failed to ask for the past two years.  Imagine how different the news coverage over the past two weeks would have been if representatives of the fourth estate as a whole had chosen a similar approach.

Imagine if Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace had responded to Donald Trump’s assessment the mid-term election “was a tremendous victory for me and the Republican party,” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump said he was unaware of Matthew Whitaker’s criticism of the Mueller investigation, Wallace had again asked, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump  took the word of another autocrat Saudi Crown Prince MBS (which I believe is short for “Mega Bull Schiff”) over that of the CIA concerning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the only appropriate response was, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump claimed the Secret Service prevented him from attending a commemorative ceremony at Aisne-Marne Cemetery in France, why didn’t at least one reporter ask, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump said he was too busy making phone calls to travel 4.5 miles from the White House to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to honor veterans last Monday, where was the resounding, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Kellyanne Conway compared the White House press office’s doctored version of the video of CNN’s John Acosta to instant replay at sporting events, it should not take a Carl Sagan to ask, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I could go on and on, but you get the point.  Ironically, the only other people regularly asking the question, “Are you kidding me?” are Trump’s defense team when their client told Chris Wallace he alone had drafted the answers to Mueller’s questionnaire.

POSTSCRIPT

Speaking of the media and their coverage of current events, perhaps they should be paying more attention to journalist icon Edward R. Morrow who once said, “The obscure we see eventually.  The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

On November 16, ABC News reported, “Nearly three dozen sealed criminal indictments have been added to the federal court docket in Washington, D.C. since the start of 2018.”  The press has offered two possible explanations.

1. To avoid a “Comey Moment,” Mueller chose to keep the indictments under wraps until after the mid-term election.
2. In anticipation of the firing of Attorney General Jeff Session, Mueller filed the indictments while Rod Rosenstein still was responsible for overseeing the investigation.

Both explanations are feasible with a couple of caveats.  If some indictments were filed as early as January, going forward immediately would not have violated the Justice Department’s “60-day rule” (assuming the policy is valid).  And, if you wanted to make sure Sessions’ successor did not intervene in the grand jury proceedings, why not move forward and issue arrest warrants for the targeted subjects?

Previous Mueller filings and indictments provide a better explanation for sealing the court documents.  In each instance, Mueller’s team laid out in great detail with substantial evidence each of the alleged crimes.  As the indictments move closer to Trump’s inner circle, we should expect no less.  This information would be invaluable to Trump’s defense team as it would offer an opportunity to manufacture alternative explanations for any perceived collusion or obstruction of justice.  I have no doubt Mueller wanted Trump to first give his side of the story (either through written answers or an interview) without benefit of what the Mueller team already knows.

As I have often said,  Occam’s Razor can be a blunt instrument.  In this case, it may be as sharp as a non-existent laser carving knife offered by Matthew Whitaker’s defunct company World Patent Marketing, Inc.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP