Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC interviewed immigration lawyer, elder statesman and guru, Leon Wildes, about his representation of John Lennon of the Beatles. The US government threatened to deport him because of a cannibis resin conviction in the UK.  In this interesting segment, O’Donnell and Wildes discuss the history of the use of the government’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion.  During his representation of John Lennon, Wildes filed a Freedom of Information Act request and discovered there were thousands of people with drug convictions that could have been deported, but the government, then under President Nixon, selectively chose to go after John Lennon for political reasons.  Prosecutorial discretion and/or executive action has been used in other contexts over the years by other presidents and their authority to do so is widely accepted among legal scholars.  And, every day district attorneys and US attorneys at every level of local, state and federal government make discretionary decisions about who to arrest and prosecute based on their priorities on how to spend their limited funds. So, the antagonism against President Obama’s anticipated announcement of executive action is not new to him.  Of course, there is a much easier solution – and that is for Congress to pass immigration reform bills.