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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Sure it does. It's not Ted Stevens level exculpatory, but it may show that certain claims against Assange are unwinnable (deemed by Obama DOJ to violate First Amendment) and brought in bad faith for leverage purposes.
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Like I said, it doesn't go to any
facts relevant to the claims. You want the defense to see the government's own assessment of
legal arguments and I understand why you do, but that's not what I said.
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At the heart of the controversies around Whitewater, Benghazi, Hillary's emails, Stevens, Menendez, Trump is the issue of whether politicians are using or hijacking prosecutions and investigations for political purposes. (Of course they are.)
I'm not naive enough to think selective prosecution will be a defense any time soon, as law enforcement would never allow something that would balance the system and give defendants true equal footing, but it ought to be at least a mitigating factor. Even Manafort's trial judge said as much when he mocked the prosecution for nailing Manafort for what he'd never have been charged with (a previous investigation for same charges was closed) but for his association with Trump. But of the myriad abuses politicians engage in, using prosecution as a tool (stunts like Devin Nunes' referring an already convicted Michael Cohen to the DOJ as a result of his Congressional testimony come to mind) wastes resources and debases a system which is supposed to be (to the unlearned at least) our least easily corrupted.
People have good reason to view the justice system with a jaundiced eye. It's not "imperfect." It's predatory, unfair, discriminatory, and has far too much unchecked power. If we can remedy some of that by making selective prosecution at least a mitigating factor for sentencing (if not the outright defense it ought to be) in politically polluted cases, that defense may trickle down to cases in which law enforcement preys upon the poor and disadvantaged because they're easy targets who can't afford lawyers. A step toward making selective prosecution a defense or mitigating factor would be making public the valid reasons Obama chose not to charge certain crimes and juxtaposing them against what I'm sure are the cynical reasons Trump's DOJ decided to charge. If we're going to be juxtaposing Barr's spin on Mueller against Mueller's actual words, let's also take a look at how Barr's logic on broader charges against Assange compares to Holder's logic.
This would be uniquely interesting because Holder was no friend of leakers and their abettors. And he was a cynical sort himself, not above creating dubious policies (recall the Holder Doctrine?). If Holder couldn't charge Assange as broadly as Barr's people have, it might expose that Barr is doing this for the most dangerous of reasons: He wants a showdown over the First Amendment.
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If you ran the world, any defendant with the chops to create media buzz suggesting that they have been targeted unfairly would then get off, because you are a sucker for that sob story.
eta: If selective prosecution concerns you, how about the Supreme Court's decision today in Nieves? Much more concerning to me than the decision to prosecute Assange.
