Powerline has been great on this and other stuff. I have to say that I’ll suspend judgement on “one of my readers wrote to tell me he’s a neighbor of THE Robert Strong and went and had a chat with him and discovered he’s a BDS sufferer.” I’m not suggesting Powerline didn’t check this as well as it could be checked, just that its a bit slim (useful as potential Exhibit #34,567, but…)
I was trying to ‘splain what this document forgery mess is like to someone still stuck in Old Media Think and the best I could come up with was that if she were sitting on a jury and these documents were put into evidence against the defendant and represented the only “hard evidence” (not hearsay or circumstantial or testimony of some remembrance of casual conversations that happened 35 years ago), the prosecution (the memo introducers) would spend about two hours trying to show the docs to be legit and the defense would spend 2 days eviscerating the legitimacy of the documents from every concievable angle with expert witnesses crushing the validity of them from technical to content to form, get two of the prosecution’s three witnesses to sit there and say the docs were probably faked, and leave the third witness stammering that the documents were “consistent with” and “compatible with” his version of the “truth”. And the prosecution’s rebuttal after two full days of killing this one lonely bit of hard evidence, would be calling a typewriter repair guy who had nothing to do with any of it to say that it was potentially possible for the docs to be valid.
As a juror you’d have to say that it was perfectly clear the docs were bogus and since they were the only bit of hard evidence, therefore there is no hard evidence. And since the hearsay, circumstantial, and “tired testimony” was pretty much equal on both sides and tells nobody anything incontrovertible, you’d have to find the defendant not-guilty (the prosecution’s case “unproven”).
And, at the end of the trial, as a juror you’d be sitting there pissed off that anybody brought this stupid, useless, tired old case to court and consumed everyone’s time and you’d be doubly pissed that they might call you in as a witness against the prosecutor at some later date when he was charged with falsifying evidence.
