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