Selective prosecution is a key tool of an oppressive government, reposting one of my comments here, which was related to a politician seemingly getting a similar treatment:
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the
very embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the
law, and they SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full
knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if
they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew
every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose
the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible
people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or
unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete
and total political power.
You an absolutely be sure that at the bare minimum a large minority of CEOs of large company are in or have been in a similar situation. Laws on insider trading are very all encompassing and are broken on a regular basis by practices that are considered normal. It may have been fraud, and it may have been illegal, but that dosen't make it any less of a leveraging tool for people like the NSA.
That might be true, but law enforcement agencies are trained to reconstruct evidence via a process called "parallel construction" to avoid revealing their sources (NSA for example) so you might never know the whole thruth: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parall...
Your link isn't even an account of the trial or the details of the charges, it's just one guy disputing one version of the Nacchio story.
The "fraud" involved an overly optimistic assessment of Qwest's future. That might indeed legally be fraud but it's hardly blatant in the sense one might argue it's a fairly common occurrence and most instances of such behavior go to civil, not criminal court.
"In its case, the government stated that Nacchio continued to tell Wall Street that Qwest would be able to achieve aggressive revenue targets long after he knew that they could not be achieved. This helped it buy up regional phone rival US West, the government alleges."
I don't know if I would call it blatant guilt. The prosecution of insider trading in this case seemed to be very selective. How often do CEOs go to jail for that?
With enough budget and motivation, it'd be easy to paint even you -- regardless of who you are and what you have done -- as a villain, especially with the cooperation of the press.
You an absolutely be sure that at the bare minimum a large minority of CEOs of large company are in or have been in a similar situation. Laws on insider trading are very all encompassing and are broken on a regular basis by practices that are considered normal. It may have been fraud, and it may have been illegal, but that dosen't make it any less of a leveraging tool for people like the NSA.