Originally Posted by spence View Post
At this point I don't think it's the point of the Mueller investigation to provide proof for anything beyond what they have indicted.
Certainly these plea agreements are not given as get out of jail free cards. They are evidence that further indictments are justified for more severe crimes.
I was just reading an article by a guy who was a federal prosecutor who said the exact opposite....how many cases have you tried?
"Justice Department policy calls for prosecutors to indict a defendant on the most serious readily provable charge, not to plead out a case on minor charges to obtain cooperation. The federal sentencing guidelines also encourage this. They allow a judge to sentence the defendant below the often harsh guidelines calculation. This can mean a cooperator gets as little as zero jail time or time-served, no matter how serious the charges. This sentencing leniency happens only if the defendant pleads guilty and provides substantial assistance to the government’s investigation. That is what enables the prosecutor to entice an accomplice to cooperate; the prosecutor does not need to entice cooperation by pleading the case out for a song. The practice of pressuring a guilty plea to the major charges makes the accomplice a formidable witness at trial. The jury will know that he is facing a potential sentence of perhaps decades in prison unless he discloses everything he knows and tells the truth in his testimony. That is what triggers the prosecutor’s obligation to file the motion that allows the court to sentence under the guidelines-recommended sentence. Trading a plea on minor charges for cooperation is a foolish gambit that badly damages the prosecutor’s case. It suggests that the cooperator must not have disclosed details about the major scheme. Otherwise the prosecutor would have charged him with it. It implies that the prosecutor is so desperate to make a case on a major target that he gave bad actors a pass on serious charges — something experienced prosecutors know that juries hate. It is even worse to plead accomplices out on false-statements counts. This establishes that the main thing the jury should know about the accomplice is that he is not to be trusted. That is not how you make someone a strong witness. And unlike the accomplice who pleads guilty to the major scheme, an accomplice who pleads guilty to false statements is looking at a maximum sentence of just five years and a more likely sentence of no time even before he has cooperated — not much of an incentive to disclose everything and tell the truth. A good prosecutor does not front-load the benefits of cooperation; he makes the accomplice earn sentencing leniency by full disclosure and testimony."