The first man caught up in the Russia Hoax, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, is seeing his case come to an end.

He was scheduled to be sentenced on December 18 on the charge of lying to a federal agent. That investigation, as we now know, was a barking shambles of bad faith and corruption. But, on the advice of highly conflicted counsel — the law firm that prepared the FARA declaration that was the basis of the charge that Flynn lied also represented him in the criminal proceedings — and under extreme pressure from federal prosecutors, Flynn entered a guilty plea.

His new counsel, Sidney Powell, has done a superlative job of laying bare a lot of the misconduct but Flynn’s guilty plea has been too big a burden to overcome. Today, the federal judge overseeing the case, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, rejected all of Flynn’s requests for additional documents and set January 28 for sentencing.

I was never a huge fan of Mike Flynn the would-be political actor. But there is no doubt that Mike Flynn, the intelligence officer, served his nation in an exceptional manner. His innovations in pushing intelligence cells out of headquarters bunkers and out to combat units dramatically improved the ability of our forces to process and exploit materials and interrogations so that one raid often cascaded into a series of operations that rolled up insurgent organizations before they knew they had been compromised. The way the James Comey’s FBI and Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department conspired to neutralize Flynn and criminalize the ability of an incoming National Security Advisor to talk to whoever the f*** he wanted to talk to is nothing more than shameful. The FARA allegation against Flynn was corrupt and contrived as demonstrated by the directed not guilty verdict issued by the federal judge overseeing the trial of his business partner. All the prosecution of Flynn did was serve as a way of tainting President via guilt by association and using his entirely above board association with various Russian organizations as a way of underpinning the plausibility of the utterly implausible Russia Hoax.

Enough is enough.

Flynn served his nation and his president loyally. He has been screwed with for three years. His reputation is in tatters. His son was threatened with indictment as a way of bullying Flynn into pleading guilty. He was lied to. He was lied about. He has lost his house and his life savings. And this abuse all came at the hands of the government he’d served.

Lawyers are always fond of saying “let the process play out” as though that were wisdom rather than cowardice. The process has played out.

Now is the time for President Trump to act.

Now is the time to pardon Mike Flynn and do so in a way that puts the lie to the entire malicious plot that destroyed his career. And then he needs to make it his mission to go after everyone who worked on Flynn’s investigation and break them professionally as a national reparation.