Today federal prosecutors are so much worse in terms of using prosecutorial discretion than they were in prior times in America's history going back even one hundred years. Using good prosecutorial discretion means you don't prosecute even if the person's behavior clearly broke the law if there is a compelling public policy reason why! If you take the job of prosecutor you take on the duty of having to weather and take criticism for using prosecutorial discretion to not prosecute people it's called having character and geez is it in short supply in DOJ leadership today! This is evident in the U.S. federal government prosecution of Ms. Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of the giant Chinese telecommunication corporation Huawei Technologies, for Huawei's violation of the sanctions against Iran. There was a company working in Iran called Skycom Technologies allegedly what happened is Huawei sold technology to Skycom and ran the transactions through the U.S. banking system denying to the banks involved that Skycom was an affiliate of Huawei and Ms. Wanzhou in her capacity of CFO made many misrepresentations along these lines. The DOJ issued an arrest warrant for Ms. Wanzhou on these bank fraud/sanction violation charges and she was picked up on this warrant in Canada this past December and is fighting extradition. The arrest has infuriated the Chinese government and caused a lot of retaliatory arrest by the Chinese government and has hurt the Canadian government whose citizens are the ones experiencing these retaliations. This is bad prosecutorial judgment on multiple accounts. Prosecutors can vindicate U.S. laws and create a deterrent by solely prosecuting the corporation, Huawei, and fining them so they don't profit from the sanction violation. Good Prosecutorial judgment would foresee that there would be retaliatory prosecutions and be alarmed by such a possibility especially if it became the norm to arrest and prosecute top executives of U.S. corporation doing work in foreign countries. The standard always has been you go after the companies not the top managers because again you don't want to make your citizens that are executives targets. The other thing is America has been and hopefully will return to being a country that is all about being fair. Why single out the CFO of Huawei, there has been an abundance of companies that have violated the Iran sanctions, the North Korea sanctions and other country sanctions America hasn't gone on a prosecutorial tirade against top executives of these businesses. It is basic good judgment that is called for here you don't go after individual people prosecutions when prosecution of their businesses can serve the American people's interests and doing such prosecutions will cause major international rifts, it's called "How To Be A Prosecutor 101"!
Part of it is more and more laws that keep getting passed over the years, giving them more and more power. The other part is a declining bar for ethical standards. Once the law departed from obvious morality, prosecutors seemed to lose connection between the law and morality, seeing it as fair game to enforce any and every law to the letter however so they choose. It's amazing that the U.S. could get Canada to extradite her to the U.S. for a crime not even committed on U.S. soil. Her crime was just using a U.S. bank to make an electronic transaction. Business owners in Iran are complaining businesses in other countries won't sell to them even if it is legally allowed by the governments in other countries because it would be too much trouble to determine whether the specific type of transaction would actually be legal, and they do not want to be exposed to the legal risk.
This is a Chinese citizen who was in Canada who was extradited to the U.S. for a sale of communications equipment from her Chinese company (in China) to Iran. What's more remarkable is the Canadian government at the time opposed the sanctions on Iran.
