Posts by Keir Leslie
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I don't get why Ede didn't resign early and firewall the whole thing. The whole point of the fall guy is they can do the time to keep the don clean.
(Also, yes, I can't see English throwing civil servants under the bus.)
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In my post above, A (Williams) should be A (Lusk) --- I had my disgusting characters confused.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
Yes -- the conversation where Slater speculates whether or not there's some kind of Granita Pact between Joyce and Collins is priceless. And it's worth remembering that it's not like Slater's been there for ever or anything. In 05 he was not a big deal; now he is. Why? Because the National Party made him.
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Here's a fun one. A & B discuss blackmailing C, with the goal of making C act in a certain manner. (A is employed by a rival to C.) They identify the way in which they would carry out this blackmail: they would publish vague and threatening intimations of things to come, and then tell C that these threats would be carried out if C fails to act in the desired manner. (This pattern, of trailing threats then carrying them out is one that B has used prior and will use in future.)
B then publish those vague and threatening statements, but C pre-empts the need for A & B to tell C about this blackmail by acting as they wish anyway.
This, I think, is the most generous interpretation of Williams (A) and Slater (B) actions as documented in their emails and on WhaleOil --- that is, they formulated a plan to blackmail Hide (C), but never put it into action because Hide pulled the pin anyway. Have they committed an offence? Because it seems like there's a case there for attempt or conspiracy --- sure, they never carried it through, but they planned & discussed it, and they took a key concrete step towards the commission of the offence.
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“I haven’t read the book and I have a bunch of opinions”.
[Seriously, why not just go read the book? It's quite short! Hager's pretty good at telling a story. It's quite an easy read.]
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Tom Barker,
Exactly! It's not like Hager's hard to find --- people with incriminating emails seem to do it all the time.
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A blogger and a National strategist blackmailing a Minister of the Crown and leader of a political party to force his retirement?
Isn't that what the Whips' Office does on a regular basis? Sure, it's generally not as rough as the alleged blackmail here, but "senior National Party figures use pressure to force politicians to do what they want" is pretty much a truism.
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But Ede was clearly worried people would figure out what he was doing, There’s no naive clickers here, there’s paid professionals snooping and talking about evading security measures. The question of proof in the case of the naive clicker simply isn’t that relevant here.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yeah I think the Law Society needs to ask serious questions about her behaviour there.
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Does anyone seriously think Cathy Odgers knows people in HK who'd actually seriously pose any threat to a New Zealander's safety? If she is in fact in deep with the kind of international crime figures, they'd hardly need to be told where Hager lives. It's delusional, fantasyland stuff, and I think quite revealing about what these guys wish politics was like: an aggressive, thuggish, macho discipline where bystanders get fucked up just because.