Saturday, January 27, 2018

Papadopolous Had No Attorney When He Appeared in Court To Confess His Crime and Thereby Implicate Donald Trump

Consider the contrived nature of the following:

Audio reveals details of George Papadopoulos' July arraignment in closed Virginia courtroom. 

 Listen to Van Grack wing it. Judge Beryl Howell delivers.

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 on 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 spoken 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 expected.

All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopolous into custody.
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