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I was unfamiliar with this incident, but it looks just plain weird. They were jailed at the end of October and conducted themselves in a way that I would say moves me in the direction of agreeing with you:
On the other hand, they were released a week later and the story is weird:
I don't know. I again decline to defend the competence of TTV or their honesty, but I don't find it particularly implausible that they thought they were working with a confidential informant, that they should not have to disclose that informants identity, and that they were either surprised to be jailed over it or willing to go to jail briefly as a publicity stunt. I don't think this incident provides strong evidence with regard to whether they're lying or not.
Oh wow, yeah that's my bad. I did not know details about this incident and just repeated what Newsmax/AP said in their article. I looked up the court of appeals decision that reversed the contempt finding and it describes an absurdly vindictive district court judge. The judge granted a preliminary injunction which is based on emergency arguments, but the judge included a requirement to disclose the identity of individuals involved and then almost immediately spun up contempt proceedings before anyone could get their bearings. Contempt findings are fairly rare, contempt jailings are extremely rare, and this is one of the most bonkers contempt jailings I've ever heard of.
I agree with you completely that this incident is too weird to tells us much of anything about TTV and their honesty. I edited my post above to reflect that.
This sort of thing is a good part of why it's difficult to seriously prove matters, and why I push so hard about fair and quick access to neutral and open courts.
Konnech eventually sued LA County, which settled for 5 mill. It's not like this stuff would make TTV's claims credible even if they were true -- their claim was just that Konnech had run a poll worker software server in some way that stored data in China, which would have been a PII boo-boo (that a lot of places struggle with) but said nothing about the actual 2020 vote -- and Konnech had a fair defense that the LA criminal lawsuit was based on claims that, even if true, were more contract breach than criminal violation.
But I can't find much out about whether they were true. Given the LA County DA's office makeup at the time charges were filed, it seems weird to have gotten fooled by TTV shitpost-grade claims, but it'd I'm not sure if it's weirder than five million dollars.
If I had to bet, I'd say that TTV are lying (or being so extremely credulous or indifferent to the truth that the difference doesn't matter), but I don't think this is the best evidence for it, simply because whether or not they believe what they're saying, there's quite a lot of reasons to be willing to go to jail rather than reveal sources (or 'sources') or leave a lot of paperwork anywhere that would.
Remember the Biden Journal thing? Plea bargains aren't proof of anything, but the subsequent rulings make it extremely likely that the journal was real. Annnnnd Veritas founders were had their homes and offices stripped in morning raids that left them standing in their skivvies, the
fedssomeone who must have stumbled on random paperwork somewhere leaked privileged information to the New York Times who was in the middle of suing these guys, the informants/thieves singled out for felony prosecution (with a plea), and the whole mess was at least a small part of why decreasing trust from donors and potential sources drove Project Veritas bankrupt.EDIT: and that wasn't exactly a theoretical example for TTV specifically; they'd been slapped with a Voting Rights Act lawsuit pre-J6 that went to (bench) trial and is in the appeals process today.
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