You kind opened a bombshell with your first sentence about expectations and desires that precedent be followed given recent Supreme Court pronouncement….just saying.I certainly understand what your saying but shouldn't we expect and desire precedent to be followed? Precedent is there to be followed as a check against a crazy political atmosphere. I think we can all agree the political atmosphere is absolutely nuts right now.
As to the leak, was it really a leak? We have known they had enough information and evidence to charge Hunter for these specific crimes for some time. That's what caused much of the criticism of the FBI/DOJ.
As to the substance of whether we should expect and desire precedent to be followed…..no, not particularly IMO.…in general and specifically with regards to this particular situation of a self created protocol for doing things. That’s not “precedence“ in any legal sense. I don’t expect or desire an agency to continue protocols that they themselves established just because “that’s the way they’ve always done it.”
When we are talking about legal precedents established by the Court’s opinions, there should be respect for and recognition of prior decisions, but I don’t think the Supreme Courts should be hidebound to never changing them.
As for “leaks”…I would ask “how we have known that they have enough information and evidence to charge Hunter for these specific crimes for some time”? I would propose that the answer to that question is because of prior ”leaks”. Consequently, my point still stands. The propriety and benefit of waiting to file charges until after the election has already been lost and is completely negligible BECAUSE we’ve all supposedly known what the evidence supposedly is. Not filing until after the election in this situation….and pretty much all situations isn’t a check at all against a crazy political atmosphere. In fact, a pretty good argument can be made that filing against Baby Biden right now would decrease the crazy political atmosphere rather than hyping it up.