organization lawyer earlier today who said, hey, we re happy to get this resolved and we re the ones who wanted this in the first place, later suggesting this is a politicized move by the new york attorney general. and we re going to keep focusing on michael flynn. hallie, we ll be watching to see what the white house says. glen, what do you make of what the judge did today? and sarah sanders is walking out right now. we re going to go to her once she starts touching on this story in particular. but what do you think of what the judge did today, and was it a message to those in donald trump s orbit? was it a message to right-wing media? or was it a put the fear of god into michael flynn to get him to cooperate more? it may have been all of those things. i was in the courtroom for this hearing. as a federal prosecutor, i had appeared before judge sullivan before. what i can tell you is he s a fiercely independent jurist, and he despises government misconduct. i will say usually that
get to come in and just say the government tricked me. on one handed it may have been sullivan getting something off his chest or expressing disdain for what the flynn team did. worth noting flynn walked that completely back. flynn said i knew you are not supposed to lie to the fbi and i accept what i did. but it seemed like it went further than that for the judge, it seemed having gotten that off his chest, he didn t just resume normal operations. he implied what would possibly be a probation sentence new york city jail time at all, he could impose a greater sentence. it s almost like he s saying it doesn t matter the deal you cut, i m still the judge. and ken got it absolutely right. the judge has the final say here. judge sullivan has a reputation for being a sort of compassionate guy when it comes to sentencing, but as ken notes, he s got very little patience for government misconduct, and in this regard, michael flynn is the government.
and maybe didn t feel like the prosecution dealt with that as seriously as they should have? what do you think he was getting at there? that s right, ali. as matt pointed out, judge sullivan has this reputation of being very tough on government misconduct. so in the ted stevens case he was very hard on the prosecutors. in this case michael flynn was a high government official who committed in is conduct and that seemed to really offend the judge. he even brought up former cia director david petraeus, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor for handling classified information to his mistress and got probation. he said i was against that sentence, i probably shouldn t say this but i thought that sentence was inappropriate essentially. and his message seemed to be if you re a high government official and you lie to the fbi and lie about lobbying to a foreign government, you should be held to maybe a liar standard than maybe a regular person. that was the message that came through loud and clea
how key say that? what an outrageous hypocrite. this is the same man who complained about the white house talking to him and the president talking to him directly about cases because, quote: there were procedures about how the white house was supposed to communicate with the fbi fbi and justice department. the rules didn t apply to donald trump when it came to targeting him. and they were holding him out to a standard that they held no one else out to. ed: this is what the president and rudy giuliani have been saying there are two standards of justice. this fires a lot of people up. i have less than a minute, tom. bottom line, do you think there is a chance judge sullivan says the fbi acted improperly here, i m throwing out the charges against flynn. i think he ought to do it. he needs to initiate proceedings, throw out the charges based on government misconduct and protect general flynn from being prosecuted anymore on these issues. and if he doesn t do it president trump can t pa
information that russia was planning to do a campaign to try to influence our election. are we talking semantics here? people want to quibble over somebody you don t know is contacting people, getting information for them and feeding them back to a federal agency, some people call that spying. semantics really matter. what spying implies is in watergate and this is why they are using it, the notion of one party actually putting an agent does it matter of that person is embedded or on the fringes of the campaign and have contact? i have done a lot of cases of government misconduct and every time they had behind confidential informant. when it comes out stefan helper will never have been identified as a confidential informant, his name, partner and company in the uk as long time head of mi 6, a spy agency that formed the first