But is that how these witnesses were appearing — to testify to FAA policy? It looks different from the e-mails. It looks like she’s talking about facts that the witnesses, I would guess, know at least as much about as she does.

Whew! That was fun!

What if the witness doesn’t actually believe that? Do they still “need to assert” it?

How many days until the truth comes out that the ENTIRE prosecution team was complicit in the violations?

Of course, I have no grounds for that statement other than the fact that the federal government just seems to be plain overreaching in everything else and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for them to be overreaching here.

That, and the fact that this prosecution team already jeopardized their case long before today’s news by engaging in inappropriate questioning at trial.

Anyway, I’m skeptical that Ms. Martin was the only screw-up in this trial. The word “scapegoat” comes to mind.

Still, I tend to agree that she’s a pitiable bureaucrat. She screwed up — badly. But her mistake doesn’t seem to warrant the sort of story that the NYT ran on her the other day, for which the Times apparently called former colleagues and even Martin’s mother to get as much dirt as possible.

no wonder the government doesn’t want to put the Guantanamo detainees through a similar sort of public process

Yah, that Bill of Rights sure is a pain in the neck.

Yeah, not being able to tell a third-party witness why they’re going to testify, what the law of the case is about, what the interests of the client are …. again, criminal law is a mystery, but isn’t that what lawyers do? What could be wrong with “the defense will exploit the fact that the FAA was not clued in to what was going on — you need to assert that we did not necessarily need to wait until we got all available information, that we acted independently, indeed, we had a statutory mandate, to follow up on any issue that we thought was a threat to civil aviation”? That sounds to me like advice and representing your client’s interests. My sense is that civil lawyers go much further in deposition prep. But what do I know?

What appears to be the reason that it is a problem here is that the judge issued an order prohibiting any communication to witnesses of certain things, as a kind of super-sequestration order. Perhaps that is common or at least legitimate in criminal prosecutions.

I’ll defer to you on what’s normal for agency counsel, but you’re saying it’s OK for a government lawyer to tell an agency witness what facts the witness should testify to? That was the impression I got from the e-mail quoted in the Post.