David Weiss’ Responses to Motions to Dismiss

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David Weiss has responded to Hunter’s motions to dismiss. These will definitely be covered by the frothy right.

Nowhere in these filings do David Weiss’ AUSA deny he lied to Congress.

As I have noted, Chris Clark alleges that Weiss’ First AUSA told him on June 19 there was no ongoing investigation. David Weiss told Congress something completely different.

In these filings, Weiss simply ignores the evidence that Weiss reneged on a plea deal in the context of their treatment of the diversion. The two sides are both cherry picking language about whether the diversion went into effect. But you can’t discuss them except in context of Weiss reneging on a signed plea deal.

And in the context of that, Weiss simply dismisses the pressure — much less the threats — from Congress. That goes to the vindictive prosecution claim.

 

 

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20 replies
  1. EW Moderation Team says:

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      • boloboffin says:

        That’s why I deleted past the question mark: because I thought it was tracking. But maybe it’s only an number that pulls up the story… or maybe you don’t even need the /story part of the URL.

        Anyway… it’s all about the “oooooh, and then David Weiss said this biting thing” terrible coverage of the issue.

        • Tech Support says:

          It can be a tracking thing, but not necessarily.

          the ? in a URL represents the beginning of a query string. Everything after the ? represents a series of key/value pairs that are passed as parameters to the web server hosting the site. In the case of the URL above, the key is “id” and the value is “106427023” which represents the unique identifier of the article within the website’s content management system. Click any Youtube video and you’ll see the exact same method being used, although their unique identifiers are more complex in order to compactly represent what could be one of millions of different videos.

          You can have multiple key/value pairs after the ?. The + symbol is used to separate out the pairs, so ?id=this+yourssn=wowcanpeopleseethat.

          Which means that if you really want to, you could look at a URL and selectively edit out any key/value pairs that you think are unnecessary or intrusive.

        • RipNoLonger says:

          Hi, Tech Support. We really appreciate any we can get!

          I’ve started noticing that many news outlets no longer use query string parameters to pass information about the request. They are switching to encoding the information in the actual URI (the part before the “?”). This tracking info looks like part of the URL and is impossible to remove since it renders the URL as a “404 – Inaccessible”. On the back-end the server software just takes this tracking info and digests it as if it were a query ID= string.

        • Tech Support says:

          Not surprised to hear that. There was a time many moons ago when developers were using query strings for, well, everything, which exposed them to trivially simple hacks that could compromise the website.

          It might not feel like it, but hand-editing the URL in your browser window to remove some bit of referral marketing you don’t care for meets the technical definition of hacking. Even if your use case is perfectly legal the site owners aren’t going to be thrilled about any type of circumvention.

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          You might want to support that hacking conclusion. Safari and Firefox, for example, allow for automatic url tracking stripper functions.

        • Tech Support says:

          It’s circumventing the intended function of the host system. It’s a nit-picky of me to characterize it that way, but it’s technically correct.

          I would distinguish something like query string editing from, say, disabling Javascript, because disabling Javascript happens entirely on the client side of the transaction between the user and the host. With query string editing you are, in effect, passing a malformed URL to the web server.

          The examples we’ve used above are trivial and harmless. Again though, back in the “we don’t know what we’re doing” 90s, developers were doing dumb things like passing usernames in query strings and if you replaced your username with somebody else’s… ta daa!

        • Termagant says:

          Not buying it. Returning an edited query string also happens entirely on the client side.

          Once that host sends me a link, it’s mine to do with as I please. If that host doesn’t like it, it is free to not send me the link.

          The lesson learned from your 90’s example is that it’s that host’s responsibility to protect itself from malformed URLs.

  3. Peterr says:

    Nowhere in these filings do David Weiss’ AUSA deny he lied to Congress.

    This will definitely *not* be covered by the frothy right.

    • lastoneawake says:

      “Hollywood fiction”?

      It sounds like maybe they read something by Hunter Thompson by mistake.

      Some of us have been watching this Hunter thing for FIVE years.

      That scenario would never get made as a movie. Too long, and the crimes are too trivial.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Barrett’s in the tank for Trump and this prosecution. If he felt the need to convey so dismissive a characterization, he needed to sandwich it with facts that dispute it. Too much work for Devlin.

      As I understand it, gift links with shortened, rather than complete urls, usually travel through an intermediary, exposing your data to more prying eyes, and contain tracking data. They also don’t tell you how to directly find the original article.

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