Michael Flynn case places both FBI integrity and civil liberty on the line
By Alan Dershowitz, opinion contributor — 05/01/20 06:00 PM EDT
More than a year ago I wrote a series of columns that made the point that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had been set up by the FBI and may have committed no crime. I repeated my legal arguments in several interviews. This led the professional Trump-bashers — who care more about “getting†Trump than about protecting civil liberties — to attack me for “inventing†legal principles that help the Trump team.
Well, it now turns out that I was right all along. Recent revelations prove that the FBI set up Flynn and sprung a perjury trap in order to get him to lie. But if he did lie, some might ask, what’s the difference how they got him? A crime is a crime, regardless of what the FBI did to make him commit it, isn’t it?
Not necessarily. Lying to the FBI is not a crime unless the lie was “material†to an investigation. For example, if the FBI is investigating terrorism, and the subject falsely denies an extramarital affair, his lie would not be material. So the question arises: Is a lie material when the FBI already knows the truth because it has it on tape? Is it material if the only reason the FBI asked the question was not to get the subject to provide truthful information but to get him to lie?
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https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/495718-michael-flynn-case-places-both-fbi-integrity-and-civil-liberty-on-the-line
