Noah Feldman, Columnist

Judge in Flynn Case Is More Than a Rubber Stamp

There’s a reason we ask judges to review these kinds of decisions.

May 9, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Bill Barr’s Justice Department has been making some strange choices.
Photographer: Bloomberg

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It’s astonishing that Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice has “withdrawn” criminal charges against Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor, after Flynn had already pled guilty to two counts of lying to federal investigators. But after you get past the initial shock of Barr once again making partisan criminal prosecution decisions while insisting that he’s doing the opposite, a larger question remains: Shouldn’t there be some kind of check on the executive branch’s capacity to make a guilty plea go away?

The answer is yes, for extreme cases like this one. And on paper, there is.