Bowe Bergdahl’s Sentencing Delayed Over Trump’s Comments
The long-awaited sentencing of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was delayed Monday after his defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case because of incendiary comments President Donald Trump has made about the case.
Saying he needed time to study the motion, the military court judge weighing the case, Col. Jeffrey R. Nance, recessed the court until Wednesday.
Before doing so, Nance offered Bergdahl the chance to withdraw his guilty plea . He refused.
The judge’s move came after Bergdahl’s defense team argued during the 59-minute hearing that the only way to ensure a fair sentence is to take any possible jail time off the table.
To buttress their argument, they played videos of Trump lambasting their client on the campaign trail in Dec. 14, 2015, and then again as president last Tuesday.
Trump has called Bergdahl a “dirty rotten traitor” and called for the 31-year-old Idaho native to be executed by firing squad or thrown from a plane minus a parachute.
Bergdahl’s lawyers have repeatedly urged Trump, who received five deferments during the Vietnam War and has never served in the military, to butt out of the case .
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Bergdahl shrugged off Trump’s taunts.
“He’s a politician,” Bergdahl told The Sunday Times , “but I know I can’t convince the people who say, ‘Just string him up and shoot him.’ So you just move on.”
The issue of Trump’s campaign trail comments came up last week when Bergdahl entered his guilty plea without striking a deal with prosecutors, leaving his fate in the hands of Nance.
Bergdahl’s lawyers argued Trump’s remarks made a fair trial impossible because as commander in chief, everybody involved in the trial answers to him.
Nance said Trump’s comments were “disturbing and disappointing” but did not constitute unlawful command influence because they were uttered before he was elected.
Bergdahl fell into Taliban hands after he vanished on June 30, 2009, from a post in the remote Paktika Province. He had set off with the intention of reaching other U.S. Army commanders and blowing the whistle on what he considered misconduct in his unit .
But his decision to walk sparked an intense search and rescue missions during which some service members were seriously injured.
“At the time, I had no intention of causing search and recovery operations,” Bergdahl said. “I believed they would notice me missing, but I didn’t believe they would have reason to search for one private.”
For the next five years, Bergdahl was tortured and abused and forced to spend long stretches of time in solitary confinement, including three years in a metal cage. He was released in 2014 in a prisoner swap for which President Barack Obama was roundly criticized by Trump and the Republicans
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Interesting!
So continue with the sentencing. It's obvious that the comments really don't mean much and is a bullshit excuse.