How rigged is this case? Here's Politico noticing that something is wrong during the sealed proceedings.
"I can't get a hold of the judge. Are you telling me he actually entered an order sealing this case?" Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan asked.
Indeed, Van Grack said the chief judge of the district court in Washington, D.C., had issued such an order. (That judge, Beryl Howell, also happens to be a she.)
She also happens to be a former Leahy adviser, an Obama appointee and a Dem donor. Happens.
As an upcoming article of mine discusses, she's also a good friend of Loretta Lynch, Obama's DOJ boss, and of Andrew Weissmann, a key figure on the Mueller team. And so far Judge Howell has been happy to give Weissmann and Mueller anything they want. Including deciding that Manafort doesn't have lawyer-client privilege.
What's a small matter like sealing the case?
Just ask Aunt Beryl.
"We need to seal the courtroom then. I'm sorry to make you all go back out, but we need to seal the courtroom again," Buchanan announced to those in the gallery.
When the case was called, Van Grack declared that he was appearing for the United States along with Mueller team prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein.
Rhee is a Clinton donor who represented the Clinton foundation. Van Grack is an Obama donor. They don't represent the United States. They represent the left.
Van Grack said the government wasn't seeking Papadopolous' detention—a somewhat unusual move since agents had just arrested him...
Legal experts said the brief appearance was noteworthy in a couple of respects.
First, Papadopoulos had no defense attorney. Typically, a public defender will stand in in such situations at least temporarily.
"That's odd," former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer said. "You would not normally have a defendant appearing before the court and not be represented. The court wasn't concerned with it but that was strange."
Second, Papadopoulos' arrest seems to have been the product of some haste. Indeed, when he was arrested at Dulles Airport July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint. The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington.
And when prosecutors filed the complaint the next day they got a verbal order from Howell to seal it, but followed up with a written request that they could take to the magistrate in Alexandria, where they showed up almost an hour later than she was expecting.
Judge Howell will sign off on anything if it's for her boys and for the #Resistance.
Remember how the left claims that they care so much about the rights of criminal defendants. Like everything they claim to care about, it's a lie. The moment they want to nail someone in the political opposition, all the rules go out the window.