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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Wait for the jury trial because prosecutors lie and "national security" is the thing that gets lied about the most.

EDIT: The other thing to watch out for is an FBI sting where they convince a guy to do something he would never have otherwise done. It seems like every publicly touted victory from them ends up that way once the truth comes out.

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I dunno, putting an SD card in a peanut butter sandwich for a dead drop seems pretty deliberate

You wanna wait to see additional context. Sometimes allegations are completely made up, sometimes there's an alternative explanation that isn't obvious.

What are some recent examples where they falsely accuse someone of espionage?

I don't know off the top of my head for a very recent one, but the case of Wen-Ho Lee in 1999 comes to mind.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/427738-guilty-u...

How about falsely accused of terrorism?

The Liberty City 7 A. Daoud Michigan Militia Assassination

und und und

They made multiple drops, one for $30,000, another for $70,000, following months of correspondence. There's plenty of context if you read the link -- unless you are for some reason accusing the FBI of wholesale fabrication of a story leading to the arrest of two relatively unimportant scientists.

E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/the-case-of-scie...

Oh, and of course, US v. Reynolds, in which the state secrets privilege was invented, from whole cloth, based on fraudulent and perjurious claims of the US Government.

https://www.latimes.com/style/la-bk-barrysiegel22-2008jun22-...

It looks like Toebbe had no contact with an informant. He offered information to the French Embassy and the French government turned this over to the FBI. So there will be no entrapment defense.

But otherwise you are correct, more than one of these sensational cases were hatched by commission-earning FBI informants: the Liberty City 7 (a few acquitted and the others out now), the mentally ill 17-year old who was convinced to blow up a saloon near Wrigley Field (A.Daoud); the Michigan militia plan to kill the governor of that State, many many others.

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