“Under questioning by the judge during contempt of court proceedings, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio admitted his office had hired Dennis Montgomery to do an unorthodox investigation. The next day, his chief deputy explained it had to do with surveillance by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency.”
[skip]
“When Snow asked Arpaio if it was fair to say that “the informer was giving you junk,” Arpaio said, “Yes.””
Thank you. That was what I was looking for, which paints things in a different light for me. Much appreciated.
I will temper my reply, though, and say that the context of the 2015 article from KJZZ may be irrelevant in this case, especially after reading the article still posted on Drudge.
Arapio says it was “junk” but doesn’t elaborate. While I am not willing to accept at face value the validity of Montgomery’s data, I am also not willing to accept at face value Arapio’s characterization of the data as “junk” because I don’t know the context of his statement.
A lot of things can change in two years, both from an understanding of the context of the material and the perception of it.
If Montgomery wanted to have his data pulled from that trial because it was irrelevant, it may have been because he needed to have a trump card (no pun intended) in his pocket.
Think of Whittaker Chambers, who had given the government loads of purloined copied documents that Alger Hiss had given to him, but he kept a small amount of the espionage filed to himself in the event the Democrat administration of Harry Truman turned out to be completely corrupt and untrustworthy (it did, in spades) and that turned out to be a good move on his part, since instead of going after Alger Hiss, the Truman Administration (Truman Justice) went after him instead.
Fortunately, when he spoke to Richard Nixon, who asked if he had surrendered all the materials, he said he hadn’t, and those turned out to be “The Pumpkin Papers” which eventually took Hiss down.
So I don’t discount that Montgomery was trying to get all those removed for his own protection as a whistleblower. He may be unreliable, but even criminals who are unreliable may speak the truth on occasion.