17 Comments
Jan 17Liked by Yassine Meskhout

"Letting the prosecutors know I was aware of pharmacist’s disparate treatment was likely instrumental in getting my guy a misdemeanor plea offer as well."

This sounds kinda like you 'blackmailed' the prosecution - "Give my guy a misdemeanor or I let everyone know that the pharmacist is an informant".

Is that what happened or do I misunderstand? If that's what happened, is that normal practice?

Serious question - not shit-stirring...

Expand full comment
Jan 17Liked by Yassine Meskhout

> present on the grounds that ay

Typo, missing "d".

Expand full comment
Feb 25·edited Feb 25Liked by Yassine Meskhout

Thanks for delving into this so we don't have to. That's as much attention as I care to give this matter.

I do have one side question. You call this circular reasoning:

> "Epps was treated leniently because he was a fed, and we know he's a fed because he was treated leniently."

I honestly don't see that as circular. Before sentencing, the suspicious say "we think he may be an informant, in which case he won't be charged as stringently". After sentencing, they say "as we predicted if he were an informant, he was indeed treated leniently, which supports our suspicions".

I don't see what's circular about that. If being an informant is correlated with lenient treatment, then lenient treatment would be correlated with being an informant. Bidirectional association or correlation is common (indeed typical) and is not circular reasoning. What am I missing?

TO BE CLEAR, I'm not questioning your conclusions about Ray Epps (whom I had not paid any attention to, and will not), I'm just zooming in on the logic of that small fragment (which was not critical to your conclusion anyway).

Expand full comment
Jan 20Liked by Yassine Meskhout

Interesting.

Just curious, what do you think about the two defendants who got 17 and 20 years, respectively?

By comparison, their treatment seems extremely harsh compared to most defendants.

Expand full comment
Jan 17Liked by Yassine Meskhout

"Proud virgin Nick Fuentes" casually dropped in this article tickles me in a particular way.

Expand full comment

I recall The Great Gretchen Whitmer Kidnap Plot ZOMG

When I heard of the arrests, the first thing I thought was "How many were FBI informants or double agents?"

The next thing I thought was "How many of these agents will develop sudden amnesia regarding their role in developing the idea in the first place?"

And 11 of the defendants walked.

Expand full comment

This dynamic pretty much tracks with the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theories which are popular on the left, primarily. People didn’t want to believe a communist/left-wing fellow traveler had done it, so they invented a conspiracy that their domestic political enemies were responsible. And that theory is still going strong 60-odd years later, so there’s that to look forward to.

Expand full comment