Couldn’t Klayman ask why Dr. Onaka won’t say “identical”.
Onaka can’t give him reasons, and can’t even tell him that something can’t be verified; all Onaka can do is verify every submitted piece of information that he lawfully can.
That’s why the mocking here (and claims that I’m reading too much into things) is so off-target. The ONLY LAWFUL WAY for Onaka to show that a submitted fact is not true is by leaving it out of what he verifies as true. Those are the rules; he has to follow them. They are critical to understanding what his letter of verification means.
And that is why it is journalistic malpractice for TPM Muckraker to deliberately leave out the first of the 2 pages of Bennett’s request, and for AZ Central to show the letter of verification without also showing the rules that Onaka had to follow when responding to the request.
One of the first thoughts I had when I looked at page 2 of Bennett’s request, when it was published on TPM Muckraker, was “Where’s the other page that he alludes to?” To get page two, the “reporter” would have had to ask for the communications involved, and would have received BOTH pages. Why did he choose to leave out one of those pages, and why should anybody consider him a credible source since it was so easily seen that he had cherry-picked what he allowed the public to see?