The project had been set up as a fake $15 million deal to arm the presidential guard of the Omar Bongo regime in the West African nation of Gabon. It had been created by the American Department of Justice (DoJ) and run by the FBI (unbeknown to Bongo). They designed it to be a deadly weapon in their arsenal against corruption but the biggest investigation of its type in DoJ-FBI history brought only humiliation, controversy and complete legal defeat.
In February this year the DoJ asked a judge to dismiss all charges made against him with prejudice, which means they can never be revisited. The same was true of his 21 co-accused. In the end, nobody ensnared by the fictitious Gabon deal was convicted.
Presiding Judge Richard Leon of Washington Federal District Court called the fiasco ‘the end of a long and sad chapter in the annals of white-collar criminal law enforcement’. He accused the DoJ of promulgating a ‘very, very aggressive conspiracy theory that was pushing its already generous elasticity to its outer limits’, adding ‘the elastic snapped in the absence of the necessary evidence to sustain it’. He was also obliged to chastise prosecutors for ‘sharp practices which have no place in a federal court room’.
TVNL Comment: The same type of set up happens all the time, especially when it comes to terrorist related arrests. It happened with the first WTC bombing and it happens all the time.
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