Michael Flynn Is Worse Than a Liar

[Kip Currier: Insightful and important distinctions made by Harry Litman, former US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania (--and, I just discovered, brother of University of Michigan copyright scholar Jessica Litman), between "process crimes" and "fraud".]

"The word “lie” has lost its power in the Trump era. Try replacing it with “fraud.”

"The criticism is part of the overall discounting of the value of truth in the Trump era. Lies, it’s implied, are a rampant, and ultimately trivial, feature of public life. But here’s another word for what Mueller’s chasing that has not yet lost its sting: “fraud.” That sounds a lot less benign than “lie” or “process crime,” and for good reason. The fraudster, more than just fooling the victim, aims to exploit, to implement a scheme that deprives the victim of something of personal or financial value.

Under the law, fraud is a deliberate, material deception to secure an unlawful gain. The bread and butter charge of the white-collar prosecutor is fraud of some sort—wire fraud, bank fraud, or tax fraud—which constitutes about 10 percent of the federal docket and about 75 percent of all white-collar offenses. As a prosecutor, I brought dozens of fraud cases, and in my current legal practice, I routinely sue people and companies in civil court who have defrauded the government.

At the core of every fraud is a lie: an important lie that the defendant tells knowingly in order to influence a victim’s action."