Fine lines for prosecutors and businessmen

Per the NYT (HT White Collar Crime Blog), at Judge Kaplan's hearing yesterday on right to counsel issues in KPMG, a federal prosecutor said "that he thought the firm should cut off their legal fees, but insisted that the government did not put pressure on it to do so."  However, "a Skadden lawyer, Saul M. Pilchen, testified yesterday that his handwritten notes from a February 2004 meeting with prosecutors quoted one of the prosecutors at the meeting, Justin Weddle, as saying that 'if you have discretion regarding fees, we will look at that under a microscope.'"

What the government "will look at" is whether the KPMG had shown adequate cooperation to avoid a prosecution that would effectively put the entire firm out of business. That's not "pressure"?

I earlier reported on a speech by former federal WorldCom prosecutor David Anders:

Anders never had a case where a current employee refused to talk to the government. He thought it was an “interesting question what happens to get to an employee to that point. At least Anders thought it was "interesting." I was wondering whether corporations' zeal to cooperate that Anders had just described might have rubbed off in some way on their employees. Anders's curious distance here reminded me a little of Tom Cruise’s hit man character in the film “Collateral,” who explained that he didn’t kill people, the bullets from his gun did.

So how does the government's rather technical position as to its own conduct square with its prosecution as crimes of merely marginal business behavior that turn on close interpretations of business dealings? See, for example, my discussion of the issues in the Nigerian Barge case, part of Tom Kirkendall's collection of posts in that debate.