In the political realm - and perhaps in any circumstance imaginable - few liar more often than Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer. Indeed, if his lips are moving, the safest approach is to assume he's lying. Yet now that Mike Flynn is seemingly prepared to go state's evidence on Trump, Der Trumpenführer legal team is reportedly planning to smear Flynn as a liar should he reveal damaging information against Trump. It's all indicative of the utter moral bankruptcy that now reigns at the White House and gives new meaning to the old adage that there is no honor among thieves. One can only hope that Trump's attacks move Flynn to truly "spill his guts" and show where the bodies are buried so to speak. One can further hope that Flynn has plenty of damaging emails and correspondence tracing back to Trump. As for the member's of the legal team, I hope they remember that committing a fraud on a tribunal can lead to disbarment. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the coming effort to trash Flynn. Here are highlights:
President Trump’s legal team plans to cast former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn as a liar seeking to protect himself if he accuses the president or his senior aides of any wrongdoing, according to three people familiar with the strategy.
The approach would mark a sharp break from Trump’s previously sympathetic posture toward Flynn, whom he called a “wonderful man” when Flynn was ousted from the White House in February. Earlier this month, the president did not rule out a possible pardon for Flynn, who is cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Attorneys for Trump and his top advisers have privately expressed confidence that Flynn does not have any evidence that could implicate the president or his White House team.
But since Flynn’s cooperation agreement with prosecutors was made public earlier this month, the administration has been strategizing how to neutralize him in case the former national security adviser does make any claims. . . . . The lenient terms of his plea agreement suggest he has promised significant information to investigators, legal experts said. “He’s said it himself: He’s a liar,” said one person helping craft the strategy who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. Robert Kelner, an attorney for Flynn, declined to comment. Ty Cobb, the White House attorney overseeing the response to the special counsel investigation, also declined to comment.
Defense lawyers have said privately that Flynn will be unable to point to White House or campaign records turned over in the probe to bolster any claims of a criminal scheme. None of those records suggest a conspiracy by Trump or his inner circle to improperly work with Russians . . . according to people who have reviewed the documents.
“It’s pretty predictable,” said Randall D. Eliason, a former public corruption prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington. “Defense will always argue that a cooperator who lied previously should not be believed, and that there is insufficient evidence of the conspiracy. It’s Defense Strategy 101.”
Exactly what Flynn might offer Mueller about what he saw inside the Trump operation remains a mystery. Van Gelder noted that in the way the special counsel structured Flynn’s plea agreement, prosecutors avoided sharing the guts of their ongoing investigation.
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