Nothing to See Here

Recall that in the aftermath of an initial Flynn pushback against the charges against him, the prosecutors in his case withdrew their recommendation for a lenient sentence and demanded significant jail time.  Recall further that in response to that, Army Lt Gen (ret) Michael Flynn has moved formally to withdraw his guilty plea with an excoriating list of prosecutorial and FBI transgressions as his grounds.

Among the misbehaviors listed in Flynn’s plea withdrawal motion are

  • no actual record of Flynn’s statements to FBI agents exists
  • the original handwritten FD-302 witness report from a critical FBI interview is “missing”
  • subsequent versions of that 302 have been “edited” by allegedly anti-Trump FBI officials

In response, those same prosecutors now have withdrawn their harsher sentence demand and said they’d accept probation and no jail time.

They’ve been caught persecuting Flynn rather than prosecuting him, and they don’t want to have that exposed in open court. They’re hoping they can buy off Flynn with this latest move.

Move along.

Criminalizing Speech

That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.