Alan Dershowitz: Did Michael Flynn lie? Or did the FBI act improperly? By Alan Dershowitz

[mystery-ak]

Alan Dershowitz: Did Michael Flynn lie? Or did the FBI act improperly?
By Alan Dershowitz, opinion contributor — 12/17/18 08:00 AM EST

The media is asking the wrong question about the Michael Flynn case. They are asking whether Flynn lied or the FBI acted improperly, as if the answers to those two questions are mutually exclusive. The possibility that both are true, in that Flynn did not tell the truth and that the FBI acted improperly, is not considered in our hyper partisan world where everyone, including the media, chooses a side and refuses to consider the chance that their side is not perfectly right and the other side not perfectly evil.

The first casualty of hyper partisanship is nuance. So when nuance is condemned as being insufficiently partisan, truth quickly becomes the next casualty. Flynn, during his brief time as national security adviser to President Trump, told FBI agents untruths that are contradicted by hard evidence. Why he did that remains a mystery because, with his vast experience in intelligence gathering, he must have known that the FBI had hard evidence of the conversations he denied having with a Russian diplomat. Be that as it may, this reality does not automatically exclude the possibility that the FBI acted improperly in eliciting untruths from him.

The FBI knew the truth. They had recordings of the conversations. Then why did they ask him whether he had those conversations? Obviously, not to learn whether he had them but, rather, to give him the opportunity to lie to federal agents so that they could squeeze him to provide damaging information against President Trump. If you do not believe me, read what Judge T.S. Ellis III, who presided over the Paul Manafort trial, said to the prosecutors: “You do not really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

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https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/421634-alan-dershowitz-did-michael-flynn-lie-or-did-the-fbi-act-improperly

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Flynn lied. He had been telling the same story to other parties, prior to the FBI interview. They knew what he was saying had problems, so they spoke with him and he stuck to the same story. That proved to be untrue, which got him fired, then indicted.

Despite what Dershowitz thinks, the only person that matters is the judge and he wasn’t especially pleased.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/12/18/politics/michael-flynn-sentencing-mueller-russia-probe/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F