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.”
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."