Conviction Machine by Harvey Silverglate

Conviction Machine by Harvey Silverglate

Author:Harvey Silverglate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-03-09T16:00:00+00:00


3. COERCING PLEAS BY THREAT OF INDICTING FAMILY MEMBERS

Certainly, there are some cases where family members are truly co-conspirators and share equally with the primary defendant in the criminal scheme, but those cases are not the norm. Unfortunately, it has become routine among overzealous prosecutors to threaten to indict a family member if a target does not plead guilty or cooperate as demanded. Mueller’s lieutenant Andrew Weissmann perfected this tactic in the Enron litigation, and countless prosecutors have used it to extort guilty pleas—even from innocent people—and cooperation agreements that meant saying whatever the prosecutor wanted the person to say.

In the Enron case, as mentioned earlier, Weissmann threatened to indict Andrew Fastow’s wife, Lea, if he did not plead and cooperate. The couple had two small children. How much she actually knew about any of Fastow’s shenanigans is dubious, but when Fastow failed to cooperate on Weissmann’s deadline, the prosecutor made good on this threat. He indicted Lea Fastow on tax charges. She went to prison. Weissmann magnanimously allowed them to serve their sentences at different times so that the children had one parent at home. All it takes is one instructive example like that to make other targets fall in line. Weissmann and many other prosecutors have found the tactic especially effective when the threat to indict is focused on a child of the target.

That was one of the tactics used by Weissmann’s special counsel team, including Brandon Van Grack and Zainab Ahmad, to extort a guilty plea from President Trump’s national security advisor Michael Flynn.19



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