Newsmax columnist James Hirsen has a conspiracy theory to share with you in his Feb. 20 column about special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 presidential election:
The timing of the recent announcement by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein regarding the indictments of 13 Russians appears to be part of an effort to provide possible cover for the FBI, U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the Democratic Party-aligned mainstream media.
The hasty public release occurred via a press statement by Mr. Rosenstein on an unusual choice of days, a Friday afternoon that was a lead-in to a three-day holiday weekend.
It is highly possible that the intention was to have the public focus on the headlines coming out of the press conference rather than zeroing in on the underlying facts of the matters at hand.
In other words, there may have been an attempt to employ a frequently used technique of diversion to direct public attention away from the admitted wrongdoing on the part of government, which was rapidly taking over the social media and conventional headlines.
In this case, it would be the effort to direct attention away from the FBI’s failure to investigate warnings that the man accused of the atrocious killing of 17 high school students had expressed a desire to kill innocent people and was in possession of a weapon to carry out his threat.
Like any good conspiracy theorist, Hirsen has a sub-theory to throw in as well:
The indictments helped to eclipse another inconvenient developing story, which would be a major embarrassment for the special counsel’s probe, and that is, that former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is likely to be set aside.
The judge who originally accepted Gen. Flynn’s plea for lying to the FBI has recused himself from the case, since he was also a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the very court that accepted from the Obama Justice Department the Steele dossier as evidence to support the issuance of a FISA warrant to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
The new judge assigned to Gen. Flynn’s case has ordered Mueller to release to Gen. Flynn’s lawyers any exculpatory evidence in Mueller’s possession. The judge has also directed that any information which is favorable to Gen. Flynn be submitted to the court, even if the Mueller team believes that it is not material to the case.
This means that even if Mueller claims that his evidence is classified or not relevant, it still must be provided to the judge so that the judge can decide what can be released. This takes away the ability of the prosecutor to withhold or redact evidence on his own.
Just one thing, though: the judge’s order is his standard one. So there’s nothing new here.
You’d think that a guy who claims to be a lawyer, as Hirsen does, would have noticed that.