The left is furious that the Trump administration settled with former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn over wrongful prosecution, agreeing to pay him $1.25 million. Flynn had sued the government, alleging that the DOJ and FBI had politically targeted him due to his association with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Mary McCord, a former DOJ prosecutor writing for MS NOW, said it was an “ominous new precedent … to settle a baseless claim of malicious prosecution.”
But it wasn’t really a precedent. The mainstream media just pretends to ignore previous precedents by their leftist comrades in government, giving them sparse coverage. In Maricopa County, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas attempted to prosecute two Maricopa County Supervisors in the late 2000s for corruption. One of them, Don Stapley, raised about $86,000 for a campaign with no opponent, then spent most of the money on luxury personal items and vacations with his family. The prosecutions went nowhere due to cozy relationships between the judges and supervisors.
The supervisors filed bar complaints against Thomas and me — I was serving as a Special Assistant — and got Thomas disbarred. Stapley’s fellow supervisors awarded him $3.5 million of taxpayers’ money over the stress of being prosecuted.
About the same time, they also awarded $3.75 million to the disgraced former owners of the Phoenix New Times, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, who were prosecuted shortly afterwards for facilitating ads for prostitution involving minors on Backpage.com. Larkin killed himself before the trial started, and Lacey was sentenced to five years in prison.
Much of the case against them hinged on the testimony of Eryka Brewster, who said she was only 14 when she was sex trafficked. “The only way my trafficker could make any money off of me was through a Backpage ad; he worked nowhere else but there, although I did later find out that I showed up on other sites like Erotic Monkey which basically scraped ads from Backpage and posted them to their site without knowledge,” she told me. A U.S. Senate investigation found that Backpage knowingly facilitated underage sex trafficking on its site by actively editing ads posted in the “adult services” section.
The payout to the pair stemmed from a criminal subpoena Sheriff Joe Arpaio had served on them in 2007, seeking information about their website's publication of his home address, potentially a crime. Since the subpoena was broad, asking for IP addresses of website visitors who had viewed the articles, the mainstream media blew it up and a leftist judge threw it out.
But the government has previously asked the media for IP addresses, and it didn’t result in multimillion-dollar settlements. In 2009, federal prosecutors issued a subpoena to Indymedia demanding IP addresses from everyone who had visited the site on June 25, 2008. The mainstream media pushed back, supporting Indymedia, and so prosecutors dropped the subpoena. But Indymedia didn’t sue; the law at the time was still being fleshed out.
The Maricopa County Supervisors issued numerous huge settlements to opponents of Arpaio in order to make him look bad — even when they hadn’t filed lawsuits against the county! By 2021, they had paid out $100 million of these.
Former Maricopa County prosecutor April Sponsel attempted to prosecute several people involved in an Antifa riot, but after local media heavily covered the prosecutions with negative coverage, her superiors dropped the charges. ABC15 bragged, “On February 12, 2021, MCAO dismissed the gang charges against protesters following a week of intense scrutiny because of ABC15’s reporting.”
The State Bar of Arizona, which has a history of targeting conservative attorneys, suspended Sponsel’s law license for two years, and the supervisors awarded the protesters $6 million. In another typical example, several progressive activists claimed their civil rights had been violated. The supervisors awarded them nearly $475,000.
This is happening all over the country. The City of Portland, Oregon, has paid out over $9.1 million to Antifa and related activists involved with the 2020 riots. New York City approved a $13.7 million class-action settlement, one of the largest ever for protesters, to roughly 1,380 BLM activists. Denver approved a $4.7 million settlement to more than 300 BLM protesters who had been arrested. Seattle approved a $10 million settlement to over 50 BLM activists.
It’s always the same story: leftist prosecutors cave to media pressure, drop the charges or never bring them, the progressive activists sue, and Democrats in office issue large settlements, never bothering to go to trial despite the fact a lot of the activists would have lost.
Flynn was prosecuted because prosecutors claimed he lied, stating he had not talked to the Russians about their voting at the U.N. Vice President Mike Pence said on TV that Flynn had not discussed sanctions with the Russians. Since this contradicted what prosecutors said about Flynn, he was fired as National Security Advisor. But Flynn never said he didn’t talk to the Russians — he said he didn’t remember if he’d talked to them. FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his extramarital lover, changed the FD-302 write-up of Flynn’s interview to state that he’d denied having the conversation.
Flynn’s career was decimated, his private sector work dried up, and he lost “tens of millions of dollars” in business opportunities and future earning potential because the prosecution destroyed his consulting career and reputation. “Nothing can fully compensate for the hell that my family and I have endured over these many years — the relentless attacks, the destruction of reputations, the financial ruin, and the profound personal toll inflicted upon us all,” he said this month.
The mainstream media gets by on its lies, in part, through selective reporting. But conservatives value history. Despite their Orwellian omissions, we will not forget and will call them out on their hypocrisy.