Marcus helps April, so why is Kirk in trouble for Prime Directive?

[Cadet49]

Sorry if this has been discussed ... In Countdown to Darkness, Robert April reveals to Captain Kirk that

Spoiler: Alex Marcus and the Prime Directive

his first officer, Alex Marcus, falsified reports that April had been killed on the mission to the planet, so that April could stay behind and use Starfleet technology to help the indigenous species from being wiped out by the other society on the planet. This could be argued to be a Prime Directive violation and a falsification of records to Starfleet, instigated by Marcus.

. Yet, in the beginning of Into Darkness, Admiral Marcus is responsible for taking away Kirk's command because Kirk arguably broke the Prime Directive and failed to report his actions to Starfleet. This seems hypocritical, considering what Marcus did for April years earlier - and did Spock and Kirk not report Marcus' involvement in "Countdown to Darkness"? If they kept quiet, you would think Marcus would not want to punish Kirk for his Prime Directive violation, for fear that Kirk would reveal to the public what Marcus did himself years ago to help April and the population of the planet... it seems really hypocritical of Marcus to punish Kirk for something he himself did years earlier, and hid...

 

[Christopher]

Well, the fact that Marcus had to hide what he did is the whole reason he couldn't excuse Kirk doing something similar. He had to make it look like he disapproved of such behavior.

Not sure how to resolve the inconsistency of Kirk knowing what Marcus did in the comic, though.

 

[The Wormhole]

Contrary to popular belief, there really isn't that much consistency between the movies and the comics. For all we know, the line about Marcus serving under April and keeping his secret was probably added into the comic just as a means of name-dropping a character from the movie and no thought was put into whether or not it made sense. Hell, we already have the problem of Scotty's origin story in the Ongoing comic series establishing that Marcus was running the Academy's Admissions Board at the same time Countdown to Darkness has him being April's first officer.

If you want to try to take a stab at an in-universe explanation, Marcus isn't really a nice guy and being a hypocrite seems like a pretty minor offense compared to the other things we know he did, just in the movie alone. And Kirk couldn't really go public since the only evidence he has is the word of a man he's been ordered to forget about and Starfleet won't officially acknowledge exists. Not a strong bargaining position for a captain facing to take on Starfleet's chief of staff.

 

[BillJ]

I always thought Kirk got yanked from the Enterprise for lying on his reports more than the violation of the Prime Directive.