My beef with Mueller is that his deviation from this practice undermines the ability of other Justice Department prosecutors to honor the guidelines and demand guilty-plea terms that are vital to effective prosecutions - either that, or Mueller does not have strong enough evidence to justify the grave charges he has filed.
If, as all appearances suggest, Mueller's goal is to get Gates to cooperate, such a plea , besides honoring Justice Department guidelines, would have provided plenty of incentive.
Because Kerr is under the misimpression that I claim Mueller is legally bound to follow the guidelines, he is perplexed by this passage, which implicitly concedes Mueller's discretion to deviate from them.
Mueller could have demanded an appropriate plea and pressured Gates to earn sentencing leniency by cooperating.
Applying the manual passage that Kerr himself quotes, it cannot be said that unless Mueller declined to prosecute, "Other means of obtaining the desired cooperation [were] unavailable." Mueller could have demanded an appropriate plea and pressured Gates to earn sentencing leniency by cooperating; or he could have convicted him at trial and pressured him to cooperate in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Mueller did not need to dump the most serious charges to entice the plea.
He did not need to structure a plea deal that enables Gates to avoid the penalties that Congress has prescribed for the conduct - e.g., money-laundering and bank fraud - that Mueller tells us Gates has committed.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/robert-mueller-doj-standards-robert-gates-plea-deal/
If, as all appearances suggest, Mueller's goal is to get Gates to cooperate, such a plea , besides honoring Justice Department guidelines, would have provided plenty of incentive.
Because Kerr is under the misimpression that I claim Mueller is legally bound to follow the guidelines, he is perplexed by this passage, which implicitly concedes Mueller's discretion to deviate from them.
Mueller could have demanded an appropriate plea and pressured Gates to earn sentencing leniency by cooperating.
Applying the manual passage that Kerr himself quotes, it cannot be said that unless Mueller declined to prosecute, "Other means of obtaining the desired cooperation [were] unavailable." Mueller could have demanded an appropriate plea and pressured Gates to earn sentencing leniency by cooperating; or he could have convicted him at trial and pressured him to cooperate in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Mueller did not need to dump the most serious charges to entice the plea.
He did not need to structure a plea deal that enables Gates to avoid the penalties that Congress has prescribed for the conduct - e.g., money-laundering and bank fraud - that Mueller tells us Gates has committed.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/robert-mueller-doj-standards-robert-gates-plea-deal/
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