It is nominally against the law to offer anything of value to another in exchange for testimony at trial. I cannot offer you money, no matter how small an amount, to get you either to testify or not to testify or (especially) to testify in a particular way — notice how I skillfully avoided the word 'perjury'.
Yet, prosecutors do this all the time without penalty as when a criminal is offered leniency in sentencing in exchange for one criminal testifying against another. There's even a name for the process. It's called 'rolling'.
It is said that one knows one is living in a police state when the government may do with impunity that which the citizen cannot.
In fact, we're seeing this happen in real-time as Robert Mueller bags Paul Manafort for tax evasion and offers an easy sentence if he'll only testify against Donald Trump so Mueller can get a conviction for election tampering or 'collusion with the Russians' — or something.
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