Not arguing with you, just sincerely asking: how can Jawbone control what the DoJ does? They can claim a crime has been a committed, but that’s a long way off from actual indictments getting handed down.

> how can Jawbone control what the DoJ does?

This likely started with Jawbone complaining to the authorities and then co-operating with the investigation. OP’s characterisation of these indictments as “a BS attempt by Jawbone's management to screw over a former competitor” would appear inchoate given the text of the indictments hasn’t yet been released.

There is a great deal more pettiness and personal vendetta in "prosecutorial discretion" than anyone wants to admit. I have no details on the specifics of this case, but it's certainly not a stretch to imagine that there is some back-end connection that gave a special-enough glimmer to this case for the DoJ to pursue it this way.

That's not to say there aren't people who are essentially random victims of "prosecutorial discretion". Lawyers need something to do all day, and sometimes that thing is finding people to prosecute.

There is of course the third possibility, however unlikely, that the accused engaged in truly reprehensible and brazen theft of their former employer's intellectual property, showing such wanton disregard for civil society that they deserve to be deprived of their freedom and placed in a cage for several months, and then marked as ex-cons the rest of their natural lives. I would say there's a pretty miniscule chance of this being the case, but again, I don't know any of the details.

I'm not implying Jawbone has the same influence as Goldman Sachs but corporations have heavily influenced cases (imo) like this before.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-aleynikov-f...

> As if any of these "trade secrets" are the reason Jawbone is in liquidation

What does this have to do with anything? Whether or not they are the reason jawbone is finished is irrelevant.

I'm curious, what was your original response to Google suing Uber re Anthony Levandowski?

I can't answer for the parent but to me these two situations are not really comparable. Making self driving cars is cutting edge technology and I can definitely believe that having access to a competitor's engineering secrets could be a huge advantage. For something like fitbit I'm not so sure, it's mostly existing technology. I suppose "market research" can be valuable though, but the article doesn't offer enough details to figure out what that means exactly.

It's hard to know for sure without knowing exactly what Jawbone thinks has been stolen.

Who the fuck is approving this failed company's lawyers to waste any more of the quickly disappearing money this company still possesses?

California is not a right to work state.