Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
One is an abuse of power and of the public trust and the other is any adversarial system of justice.
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If you can get to the people looking into you and use influence or relationship to avoid the adversary system, you are not engaging an adversarial process. You are subverting it.
Also, politics often influences decisions to go after someone or not.* Most luridly in public corruption cases.
And so if politics is factored into any prosecutorial decision, in order to have a “just” system, it must be allowed to be equally available to all defendants/targets. So if Stone cannot get what Rich and Libby received, is he not being unfairly precluded from the form of “justice” they enjoyed?
You’re fixating on timing and stage of process. I’m saying that’s immaterial. How and when you use politics (subtle use of relationships and getting the chance to kill an investigation before it goes too far are political moves for which some well connected lawyers are quite well paid) to acquire a “pass” and when the pass is delivered means nothing. All that matters is the binary question: Did you get the pass?
You see a perversion of a process and its instrumentality. I get it. I actually agree with you there. But this system is already perverted, and has been forever in regard to political cases. So I don’t see much damage here. You can’t place in peril the integrity of a system the integrity of which is rightly, based on obvious known facts, already doubted by many if not most citizens.
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* Judge Sullivan even noted this in Manafort’s case, stating Manafort would not have even been in court but for the prosecutors’ desire to investigate his boss, Trump. And while Meuller admirably kept things non-political, many of his deputies were quite political and frustrated at not getting what they seemed to think they’d find.
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