On William Barr accepting "evidence" from Rudy Giuliani re: Hunter Biden. And then I remembered!

[Grins]

10 Feb 2020, Washington Post:

"Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged Monday that the Justice Department would evaluate material that Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about former vice president Joe Biden and his family."

I read that and something clicked in my memory. Late last night it came back to me.
Ahem... A real case.

A woman is discovered unconscious on the floor of her bathroom and is taken to the hospital.
Two weeks later, her wealthy family hired a lawyer to conduct a private investigation to find out if there was any of criminal conduct by her husband.
In searching her home, the son and a private investigator removed a small black travel bag (aka,'evidence') from a locked closet.
Those same private investigators then presented that "evidence" to the state.
From that "evidence" the husband was charged and later convicted of attempted murder.

Ummmm...not so fast.

On appeal his lawyers claimed prosecutorial misconduct, judicial error and destruction of evidence, and moved to reverse his conviction.
They accused the family of conducting a ''vendetta'' designed to convict him.
They called the private investigators ''private prosecutors (who had conducted a) search and destroy operation (that had) obliterated, lost, or thrown away'' key exculpatory evidence.
They argued that because the evidence came from private investigators, that the state failed to protect the security and chain of custody of that evidence, thus making the evidence tainted and any analysis of that evidence questionable.
They argued:

''Parties adverse to the defendant treated key evidence in such a way as to obliterate all of the traditional means of identification. ...It is plain that this prosecution was a product of the most unholy alliance of private prerogative, private money and private interest, on the one hand, and public power on the other. ...Because the jury did not learn the whole truth it falsely convicted an innocent man."

- The defense.
The conviction was reversed. Because:

- The state police had failed to obtain a search warrant before sending the evidence out for testing.
- The detailed notes made by the lawyer hired to conduct the investigation had not been made available to either the prosecution or the defense.
- The rich simply cannot be permitted to hire their own police and decide among themselves which evidence should be made available!

So how is a family's hired guns engaged to conduct an investigatory "vendetta designed to convict him" any different from what William Barr is doing with Trump's "personal attorney," Rudy Giuliani? Now read that last quoted sentence again, this time, substituting "Rudy Giuliani" for "Parties", and "defendant" with "Hunter Biden" and see how it reads.

Now the fun part.

In the above appeal trial:
- The wife was "Sunny" Von Bulow.
- The defendant was Claus Von Bulow.
- And the defense attorney who argued you can't allow people to hire their own police was - Alan Dershowitz.

From the movie based on the trial (actor Ron Silver as Alan Dershowitz):

"The family hired a private prosecutor! Unacceptable! They conducted a private search! Now if we let them get away with that, rich people won't go to the cops any more. You know what they're going to do? They're going to get their own lawyers to collect evidence - and then they are going to choose which evidence they feel like passing on to the DA. And the next victim isn't going to be rich, like von Bülow - but it's going to be some poor schnook in Detroit who can't afford, or who can't find, a decent lawyer!"