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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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It's a bit hard to parse, what was the agent's motivation here?

In any case, I believe this is not a peek-a-boo fallacy but merely preserving plausible deniability. Outright falsifying the record would have been more effective, but the cost in case of the original document surfacing would have been far greater. Here it is possible, with some reasonable cooperation, to pretend the rows were hidden for some innocuous technical reason, and the idea was that given the amount of data nobody will look very closely at it. A bit childish, but had a chance of working.

From the Politico story I saw linked elsewhere about this, it looks like Miller used some Excel filters to get the file to only show what they wanted but then forgot or didn't realize that filters don't actually remove any content.

After defense attorneys began to press Miller about the attorney-client messages on Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors objected, and Kelly halted the trial to permit the parties to debate the matter.

lolol this is apex whining

I can't think of any explanation except that it was a fuck-up. The original plan was to create a new log of messages with almost everything deleted and then pretend that's the only log in existence. The defense attorney would have no way of knowing any better. The plausible deniability idea doesn't make sense here because the hidden rows directly contradicted the testimony she gave in court (which Judges actually do tend to care about).

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