You can strip the ‘adjectives’ used to describe an abusive Soviet-style interrogation of an autistic kid requiring support, but you can’t strip the moral wrong of how the FBI behaved. - No matter how much you want to protect the blob from its wrongdoings. You said the reason for Cole’s arrest was written down before anyone “knocked,” and then described the evidence as clear and convincing. Yet that same evidence sat unconvincing and unclear for five years. There was no knock either. Cole was taken on his way to 7-Eleven, without body cameras, even though he had kept that routine throughout the FBI’s surveillance. You claim this issue collapses because the interrogation was recorded. It does not. The two have nothing to do with each other, and you never even bothered to connect them. Regarding the interrogation, there is an entire motion, a body of scholarly sources, and a two-decade veteran on the subject, but you don’t deal with any of that. Instead you strawman @thevivafrei as if the argument were that length alone establishes coercion. Ironically, that is the opposite of the prosecution’s stance in the CIA officer’s case, where it claimed the polygraph session was too long to produce a true result — a session far shorter and far less grueling than Cole’s. You claim the tactics used by the interrogating officers were ordinary. Perhaps, but Cole is not ordinary, and ordinary tactics are both judicially and morally inappropriate for him. That is why officers are supposed to be trained to recognize autism and developmental differences, and not use ordinary tactics on an extraordinary subject. You say it’s a crime to lie. That is true, but it is not a crime to say you are innocent when you are. The interrogating officers told Cole they would never accept his pleas of innocence, then told him that mentioning his innocence again would be illegal, and finally told him that his family would be hauled in for the same interrogation he was experiencing. What matters here is Cole’s perception, not the officers’ intentions. That is coercion, made plain by Cole’s exact words after “confessing”: 'Will my family be safe?' The license plate reader puts Cole traveling south, away from the crime scene. His car is never once seen on USCP cameras driving toward Folger Park, so he would have had to continue south for four more blocks before he could even begin to turn toward the DNC. The LPR therefore places him moving away from the crime scene, not toward it. The historical cell-site data is not a conclusion; it is data. That data shows Cole’s phone pinging in sectors that are outside where the hoodie is seen on camera. One of the towers serves Southwest D.C. rather than Southeast D.C. The one time the hoodie is seen pulling out a phone — when Cole was allegedly watching Star Wars videos — Cole’s phone does not ping. Finally, the only time Cole’s car is actually seen on USCP cameras, he is driving toward the relevant towers while the hoodie is on foot. Your article was written solely in defense of the FBI, with no moral sense at all of what was done to Cole. In fact, your very first line sought to strip morality out of the equation entirely. It was pure federal propaganda, written when the entire country wants to see a less weaponized government that admits its wrongdoing and seeks to act morally.