Word: spinners
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...turning point came in a meeting last Wednesday night. Flinn's lawyer, Frank Spinner, was in his room at the Best Western Safari Inn in Minot, N.D., when the call came from Washington: no way was Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall about to let Flinn resign with an honorable discharge. So several hours after dinner, Spinner sat down with Kelly and her family to look at her choices. He knew what Kelly would say: she would want to fight. She thought she had been abused, not just by the con man she claims lied to her but also...
...Secretary Widnall said no, and that night, as the family gathered once more in the Holiday Inn, it was Spinner's job to unravel their optimism. "You have to think about jail," he said to Flinn. If found guilty on all charges, she could face as much as 9 1/2 years in prison. "The closer you get to the courthouse steps, the more the reality sets in," Spinner told TIME later. "And in a criminal trial, the closer you are to the courthouse steps, the closer you are to the jailhouse...
...with Zigo, disobeying a direct order to stop seeing him, and conduct unbecoming an officer--charges the Air Force believed were rock solid. That morning a defiant Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald R. Fogleman, had thrown down the gauntlet before a Senate committee in a statement that Spinner claimed poisoned any chance of a fair military trial. "This is not an issue of adultery," Fogleman said. "This is an issue about an officer, entrusted to fly nuclear weapons, who lied. That's what this is about...
...that Pentagon lawyers phoned Spinner Wednesday night with word that the request was rejected. By 11 p.m., Kelly and her family had gathered with Spinner at their hotel and were arguing that she should quit the fight and pray that the Air Force would agree to give her a general discharge, not an other than honorable one. "Kelly being a fighter, her first inclination was to fight all the way," says her father Don of the session. "But we said it was pretty much that if she won the fight she might lose...
...Kelly is prepared to sign," brother Don told Spinner the next morning. Widnall, meanwhile, was at the Pentagon, where she worked out with weights, then pedaled furiously on her exercise bike to think through the final decision she would make. By 5:30 p.m. she went before the cameras to announce the resolution. "Although it is the adultery charge that has received the greatest public focus," Widnall said, "it is the allegations of lack of integrity and disobedience to order that have been of principal concern to the Air Force. It is primarily those allegations that have made an honorable...