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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

You missed the entire point. Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime which the government itself finally admitted in court after they spent millions of your tax dollars and several years destroying these people's lives and extorting guilty please from 4 men for what was manifestly and on its face not a crime.

Even after they recognized that the government was entirely full of shit they took 7 months to recognize that you can't plead guilty to helping someone commit something that was not itself a crime and at time of writing seemingly haven't returned the money the government illegally robbed victim of.

The start of the prosecution was a material misrepresentation by Amazon. Amazon would have been correct to fire him. They deliberately misrepresented the nature of the law and conduct to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense.

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Even though it may not be a crime (especially seeing as the DOJ complete failed to bring a case against them!) I can see why Amazon may have thought they were a victim of a crime and tried to get the employees involved prosecuted. There was a similar story on hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41088475) about an Army insider who was abusing her position to redirect grant funds to her self (https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/07/24/janet-y...). Now obviously what she did was significantly worse than what the Amazon employees were accused of because the grants were completely bogus whereas Amazon received what they were paid for and according to the Twitter thread Amazon were also unable to show they were worse off because of the employees actions.

I'm not sure what the lesson here is. Obviously, if you are going to do these insider scams then don't do what the Army lady did because then when you are caught you do not have a defence. On the other hand you should be very careful to make sure your legitimate business doesn't look like an insider scam because the DOJ will come after you thinking you committed an insider scam and even if you successfully defend yourself you will be massively out of pocket.

Just to add it also looks like Neumann from WeWork (https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-conflict-interest-rel...) was doing insider dealing very similar to what the defendants were accused of doing and I don't think Neumann was ever charged by the DOJ so I can see why the defendants might feel they have been unfairly targeted by the DOJ.

> Such a conflict of interest doesn't represent a crime

I have no idea. US Criminal code is literally thousands of pages long, and I have no idea whether any of the specifics of what Nelson did fits any of those pages. What I do know is that every corporate training I ever had drilled not to do exactly what Nelson had done, repeatedly, at length, with the test at the end which asked "can you do what Nelson had done?" and would not let you pass until you answered "no, never ever!". And Nelson must have known it. There's no way a person at his position wouldn't be aware of what's going on. This is pure George Constanza defense.

So if Nelsons claim "we may be scammers but you can't prove it" - sure, maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. That's for the lawyers that get paid my monthly salary every time they open their mouth to argue out. Fortunately both sides can afford them. I an not nearly qualified to predict the outcome of their argument.

What am I not missing here is that the story is not "Bezos attacks my innocent husband for nothing". On the contrary - if I am getting the story correctly and not miss a substantial fact here - the story is "My husband and his friends tried to scam Bezos using what they thought is a legal loophole and turned out it's not as easy as they thought". Maybe they will get away with it, maybe not - that really doesn't matter that much to me. But if they expect me to be all outraged "how dares Bezos to go after people who scam his company" - sorry, I'm out of that one. Unless somebody can explain to me how it wasn't a scam, "may not technically be criminal because we have good lawyers" does not do much for me.

> to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense

I'm all for law enforcement to not be an attack dog of rich and powerful people. I dream about the day where it would be true. But this is not a good showcase for that, to be honest - Amazon and the government may have screwed up the prosecution on this one (not a rare occurrence for the government - I mean, they still have trouble to properly prosecute 9/11 attackers, what do you expect on less obvious cases?) but the defendants aren't exactly the sympathetic innocents, I'd say they as close to deserving all of it as I can think of.

It certainly feels like a crime. It would have been a crime if it took place over state lines or if either the giver or the receiver of the money was a public money. Or if they had used the mail system.

https://www.globalcompliancenews.com/anti-corruption/anti-co...

The law is explicitly not what you imagine might make sense. The US government spent millions of dollars pursuing this and went with "honest services fraud" based on Amazons code of conduct which it then admitted this was incorrect.

Either this was the best ammo they had or they are horrendously incompetent.

I'd bet on "incompetent".

It feels like a straightforward federal private->private bribery law would run into the commerce clause of the constitution so we have this hodge-podge instead. Perhaps some states have more straightforward statutes.

It's not terribly useful to adjudge someone guilty of a second crime in a complex situation that will never see a judge because the case that DID see the light of day destroyed someone's life by dint of inherently defective reasoning.

There are different standards for different scenarios.

Do I think he belongs in jail? That threshold of proof has not been met.

Would I ever hire or do business with the husband or the wife? Definitely not. That threshold is very low, and they're far over it.

> they are horrendously incompetent.

US government being horrendously incompetent is like the least surprising revelation this case could make. I mean we just witnessed the head of the service which was created to protect the President from all imaginable threats to claim it's impossible to put a sniper on a slightly sloped roof - right after a sniper shot a (former) President from that roof. Compared to that level of incompetence, a botched prosecution is small change. They probably have thousands under their collective belts.

This DoJ seems primarily interested in political comeuppance, not justice.

Or corrupt.

This is exactly the kind of scenario that the foreign corrupt practices act identifies as a crime. It would be kind of ironic if it wasnt recognized as a crime in the US.

Be that as it may, from cursory research, there is a body of US law on these kinds of practices under the term "commercial bribery". I can't speak to the legal details at all but this doesn't seem to be a case of an honest person getting mixed up in the legal system. Rather the opposite in my view.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery

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