RE, don’t be an idiot. It is extremely common for people to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. It is literally maasim bechol yom. If you are offered a plea bargain, and the penalty you will have to pay is not much more (or often even less) than it would cost you — in money, time, and agmas nefesh — to defend yourself, your lawyer will advise you to take the deal, even if it means giving a false allocution, rather than risk being falsely convicted.
I personally know someone who served three years for a burglary he did not commit, because his public defender and his parents persuaded him to plead guilty rather than risk conviction at trial and a much harsher sentence. Decades later he now regrets it, but it’s too late.
In Flynn’s case we now know that there could not have been a crime, because there was no legitimate investigation to which his statement could be material. Therefore even if he had deliberately lied he would be innocent. But in fact he didn’t lie.
First of all, we don’t know exactly what he said, because the FBI, as a matter of policy, never records interviews and the only record is a written summary the agents prepare afterwards. It is very easy for them to lie, or to forget or misunderstand, and whatever they write down is now the record. This is a huge problem, it’s inherently corrupt, and it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t been reformed.
Second, he was deliberately not told that this was a formal interview; he was led to believe it was a casual conversation to do with handling the transition. So he was not on notice that he had to be exact about everything he said. He had had hundreds of phone calls with various people; he could hardly be expected to recall every detail of every call he made, weeks later, without even a reason to try hard to remember.
Third, the agents themselves wrote that they did not believe he was trying to mislead them. The corrupt criminal FBI ignored that.
Fourth, his lawyers had a huge conflict of interest, which they did not disclose to him or to the court. They persuaded him that he had in fact committed a crime, by not saying the exact truth to the agents. Also they were responsible for preparing his and his son’s foreign agent registrations, so any error was their fault, so they needed him to plead guilty so as not to attract blame themselves.
Finally, the secret deal not to charge his son, in exchange for his guilty plea, was illegal. The law requires all inducements offered for a guilty plea to be disclosed to the judge, but they told him to hide this. That’s a crime.
For all these reasons, Flynn is a completely innocent man, and what was done to him was criminal. Those responsible need to be charged themselves and should suffer what they put him through. But I don’t trust the DOJ to do that. They will let their criminal colleagues off, just as they have done so many times. It’s disgusting.