As you probably know - I meant that you know in your heart that they didn't have the charges written up two years ago. The retarded, malicious 900 pound government troll isn't that patient.
Jefferson-- yes. Washington, I'm not so sure. He had people sentenced to death for the Whiskey Rebellion.
Yes, and the old firebrand Samuel Adams certainly changed his tune during the Whiskey Rebellion...
I'm not talking about the one-paragraph charge against the Oregon folks. Someone wrote that up overnight, I'm sure. I'm talking about the 32-page, six-count criminal complaint against Cliven Bundy, which I linked to upthread. That is not a hastily-written legal document-- too many names, dates and details for that. My guess is that the charges were written up a while back, but the feds saw all the support that Bundy had from locals and were afraid of the reaction if they brought the case then. When Bundy left Nevada to go up to Oregon, they saw their chance and pulled this out of a drawer.
As I said, I have no inside information, and this is all speculation on my part. But as to the patience of the government, I sometimes do criminal-tax defense, and I've seen clients indicted a day or two before the statute of limitations ran.
Let me add, having litigated civil and criminal cases against the IRS, DOJ and SEC, in my experience the federal government is often malicious, but its lawyers are rarely retarded-- there is a lot of competition for those prosecutors' jobs.