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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I'm surprised that you're giving the FBI any good faith at all. Not intending this as some kind of gotcha, but did you pay attention to the crossfire hurricane scandal and the Mueller probe? There's so much bad faith and naked criminality in the FBI that I can't imagine trusting them at all (to say nothing of their hobby of manufacturing terror plots).

Crossfire hurricane scandel? Where can I read more about this?

That's a good question and I honestly don't have a solid resource for you. I followed the scandal as it developed over time, and that means that I can't really give you a single unified source on it - but for the record, the Crossfire Hurricane probe was what eventually got turned into the Mueller special counsel.

Where do you see me giving the FBI any good faith? The post your responding to was a story expressing skepticism to the point of disbelief because the misconduct I witnessed was conducted so casually that I wondered if I was missing something (I wasn't).

Oh, I meant that initial "it's not plausible that they're casually [redacted] on video, I must be misunderstanding something." reaction. That's far more faith than I'd give the FBI.

I don't know if this is missing context but I was talking about my work as a criminal defense attorney. I wasn't talking about FBI agents, these were just some random detectives. Across hundreds and hundreds of cases, I watch a lot of very boring video footage that mostly shows my client acting like a total dipshit and the cops being dutiful about their jobs and I get lulled into a sort of slumber. So when I do see clear instances of casual misconduct, for a moment it feels like I'm the victim of a optical illusion because it's just so damn unusual to get it on video.

The good news in this [real case I'm being super vague about] is that my job is explicitly not to assume good faith. So I conducted my own investigation and felt confident enough I did my homework before launching my broadside motion. The cops did not do well during cross-examination and the judge agreed with my argument and explicitly found them to be lying. They were very much not happy with me given the career consequences involved.

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