Michael Flynn was lambasted by a federal judge on Tuesday at a sentencing hearing, telling the former National Security Adviser that he “sold your country out,” but one Fox News analyst thinks his crimes are no more serious than pulling the tags off a mattress.
On the day that a judge delayed sentencing for the onetime Trump cabinet member, Fox News analyst Matt Schapp tried to downplay the charges that Flynn pleaded guilty to earlier this year. As Media Matters reported, Schlapp claimed that Robert Mueller’s team was reaching for anything they could find to charge Flynn.
Schlapp said Flynn’s crimes were nothing like selling out his country, as the judge had claimed.
“Instead what you have are these infractions: Pulling off mattress tags, jaywalking, parking tickets. They’re finding anything they can — anything they can — to delve into these people’s careers, to kind of legally blackmail them into agreeing to some minimal crimes,” he said.
“None of the crimes with all the people we’ve talked about over the course of the last year and a half have anything to do with the fundamental charge that somehow Donald Trump or his team committed treason by putting the interests of Vladimir Putin above Americans. This has to end. There is nothing here.”
Schlapp delivered his remarks after a judge ruled that the sentencing would be delayed by 90 days so Flynn had the chance to cooperate more. As the Associated Press reported, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan seemed to drive a dagger into the heart of the argument that Flynn’s crimes were not serious and that they were trumped up by prosecutors in order to justify the Russia investigation.
Though Robert Mueller had asked the judge that Flynn’s cooperation warranted a sentence at the low end of the guidelines — including a sentence with no time in prison — that appeared to be in doubt as Judge Sullivan hinted that he could still sentence Flynn to time behind bars.
Even before his strange defense of Michael Flynn, Matt Schlapp had generated some controversy for his defenses of the Trump administration. The conservative commentator, the husband of White House communication chief Mercedes Schlapp, made waves last year when he walked out of comedian Michelle Wolf’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as she made fun of Trump and other White House staffers.
Matt Schlapp was later criticized for expressing his offense at Wolf while defending Kelly Sadler, the White House staffer who joked that John McCain’s vote on the new CIA chief wouldn’t matter because McCain “is dying anyway.”
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