Meantime, I agree with you about this being a set up BIG TIME whether Craig is pure as the driven snow or otherwise.
I think we were all lucky that Her Heinous badly needed a news diversion RIGHT NOW.
Otherwise I believe the Craig story was on hold for use in the coming election kind of like the Foley thing that--despite their great concern for the poor little pages--the Rats sat on for quite a few months for maximum political impact.
The cop told Craig that if he copped to the misdemeanor, it didn't need to go any further--basically nobody needed to know. In fairness to the cop, whether he deserves it or not TBD, he may not have been in on setting Craig up politically. It's possible that he prefers to scare people out of getting it on in bathrooms on his watch. It's possible that's all he was trying to do and not at all unlikely IMO that scum like CREW or Hillary's operation found it simply by tracking anybody they had any kind of possible lead on.
BTW IF the cop was doing that, I'm not against it. Imagine one of your kids somewhere between 8 and 13 say going into a bathroom and finding a couple going at it--and I don't care if it's two guys in the mens room or a hetero couple in the ladies. I'm not against the sting per se, just the way it was run and the set up that resulted.
The fact that the cop pulled the trigger before he really had Craig pinned on anything that would hold up in court could indicate that all he really wanted was to stop such activity, or he realized he wasn't going to get anything more useful and settled for what he could get ... OR it's possible that he was in on the set up from the get go.
I do understand why someone in Craig's position would plead out to a misdemeanor just to keep it out of the news because of all the accusations that had gone before and the newspaper's ongoing vendetta against him.
However, IMO Craig sounds like the kid whose mother asks him what happened to the cookies she just baked and he's got all kinds of improbable excuses why he couldn't be the one who ate them.
The wide stance so wide that he touches shoes with the next stall. I've been in some pretty small stalls and never touched feet. Never been in that airport, but some Freeper who had said they're not that small. I don't know.
Saying the reason he put his hand under the stall wall to pick up paper off the floor--I could buy this one if he had dropped a paper of his own (say a scrap he'd written down with a phone # or email etc. on), but he didn't say that because there was no such piece of paper for him to show. Who picks up random paper on a public toilet floor in somebody else's occupied stall?
It's not proof and I wouldn't convict on it, but I don't find him believable on it. And I'm usually a contrarian too.
Or, the cop just wanted to hit a quota.
I think the newspaper nailed Craig. Newspapers routinely go over the lawman’s log for these things. Craig blamed them for being on him for many years and they finally found a smoking gun. Most plausible scenario.