Martha Stewart - criminally prosecuted for offenses related to a federal investigation

Scooter Libby - criminally prosecuted for offenses related to a federal investigation

and now

Ernest Wrenn - criminally prosecuted for offenses related to a federal investigation

A North Augusta man pleaded guilty this week in federal court to committing mail fraud involving the transfer of illegal machine guns and lying to federal agents.

Ernest Wrenn, 56, pleaded guilty Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina to one count of mail fraud and one count of knowingly making a materially false statement to an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Sentencing will be later.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbia, Mr. Wrenn lied to an ATF agent in 2002 about how many machine gun kits he had, and in January 2004, investigators discovered he was scamming customers by selling illegal machine guns he said were ATF-approved.

From Say Uncle

So, the only charges in the case are lying to an agent and mail fraud. Unless there’s more to it than we know, Wrenn did not have machine guns. He had made a semi-automatic Maxim. The ATF, according to the folks at Subguns, couldn’t make that stick.

Update: Basically, Wrenn got the Martha Stewart treatment. He was guilty of lying about a crime no one could prove he committed. As of yet, the details on the mail fraud charge are sketchy. Some folks allege he sold the items even though he had obtained a denial letter from the ATF stating the upper receivers were subject to the NFA. Others claim he sold them not knowing the ATF considered them NFA items but was advised to keep the money he received by his attorneys. Something here ain’t right.

So, what we seemingly have here is another federal investigation creating crime. That bothers me. It gives the federal government carte blanche authority to persecute those who may be rich, political targets, or simply for whatever reason, undesirables. There is no check on authority if selective investigations are conducted to get relatively minor yet consequential results. The seriousness of the charge ends up driving the investigation, and instead of pulling back when nothing is apparently illegal, overzealous investigators push forward. The same thing is currently happening in the Limbaugh case in Florida, though those are state authorities, not federal, the spirit is the same.