I think the personnel files are a bit different than what you would expect to see if she were fired for refusing to cooperate with a conspiracy. In that case, you’d think the pretext for her firing would be “performance” or some minor or poorly documented offense. To have evidence of her engaging in obviously firing-worthy behavior with contemporaneous email corroboration is what you’d expect if she was fired for screwing up the dashboard.
This thing goes right to the … bottom!
Pretty amazing to me that she didn’t get fired for demoting another co-worker’s access to what they were supposed to be working on. I would absolutely expect to get fired for doing that.
For context on the sort of thing people get fired for in the IT world, a friend of mine told me a story of a guy who got fired where he worked at the time, at a major Australian ISP, for misusing a client information database to look up the age of a woman he was romantically interested in. That’s all he did, check out her age. Access protocols are the law of the IT world. Bypassing them in the workplace is always considered a major crime because you have to stand on principle.
I largely agree with your view on the overall Rebekah Jones story. And maybe that’s why I didn’t think the linked personnel file documents were mind-blowing - I already didn’t believe her side of the story. (Maybe it’s also that I overestimate people’s ability to cover things up. I’d like to think that if I were going to fire a whistleblower, I could come up with similarly legitimate-looking personnel file evidence.)
What’s been more striking (to me) is her complete lack of response to the story. Seems to be an open and shut libel case if her claims are at all valid.
It already has played out.
Before that interim peace order could be examined by a court, Jones filed a citizen complaint claiming that Pushaw was in violation of it. At this point, Pushaw had not even been served the interim peace order. As is standard, Jones’s complaint was placed into a pile of similar complaints, pending examination by a prosecutor.
On April 30th, in Case No. 0602SP003672021, a judge in the District Court of Maryland for Montgomery County denied Jones’s petition to extend the initial interim peace order on the grounds that the “petitioner could not meet required burden of proof.” Specifically, the judge explained to Jones that journalism is not harassment; that Americans are free to examine the falsifiable claims of public figures; and that there was no evidence of harassment, of any likelihood of future harassment, or of any item that “would be the basis of relief.” On the District Court of Maryland’s website, this case is now listed as “Closed,” with the result, “This order is denied because: There is no statutory basis for relief.”
Although the interim peace order was immediately voided by the judge’s decision, the paperwork for the secondary complaint is still awaiting processing. Because there is no legitimate underlying peace order for Pushaw to have violated, this secondary claim will have to be dropped (or nolle prossed , in the lingo). But, for purely bureaucratic reasons, that hasn’t happened yet, and so . . .
Jones is now pretending that there is an open “criminal” case against Pushaw, when there is no such thing.
I guess there’s still Rebekah’s response to the article to play out, but spoiler alert, it’s just going to be more bullshit.
I see MSNBC - Morning Joe specifically - hosted Cooke to talk about the Rebekah Jones story this morning, US time.
I guess this is starting to permeate through to centrist media.
Yeah this one is really crazy because how it works in MD is an interim peace order is only issued if you apply for it when the courthouse is closed. Then at the next available opportunity, you have a temporary peace order hearing in front of a judge. The defendant doesn’t have to be served yet by the temporary hearing (and rarely is), but you need to show at least a bare minimum set of facts to merit having the defendant served and holding a full hearing for the final peace order.
Here, there were 3 days between the interim and temporary peace orders, meaning she probably applied for it on a Friday night. Then she filed the criminal charges the following day, still before the temporary hearing.
With that said, the outcome of the final peace order hearing shouldn’t have any bearing on whether someone violated the terms of an interim/temporary. I don’t know how the state’s attorney handles these - on the one hand it’s crazy to hold someone criminally liable if they aren’t aware there’s an order in place, but on the other hand people can evade service for a long time on these things and what’s the point of getting the temporary or interim order if it doesn’t actually have any teeth until you serve it? Why issue interim orders at all if there aren’t consequences attached to them?
Well, I presume if you get an interim order against someone and they break it, you can call the cops and they can come and enforce the order even if the person wasn’t served yet. But then any criminal complaint would be predicated on the interim order being upheld.
I guess someone told her she needed to put out “a bold rebuttal” and she got confused?
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Well whack a beard on me and call me Nostradamus.
As far as I can tell, the rebuttal doesn’t contain any direct quotes from anyone other than selective excerpts from private text message conversations which don’t really shine a light on anything. Most of the “citations” in it are her own tweets. I liked the way she managed to extensively discuss the section of the article about the bodycam video while linking about five videos, but never links the bodycam video nor actually disputes what it shows. Her response there also led me to this:
This is hilarious to me because how the fuck is it a cop’s fault that her son is there, “barefoot and 48F”? She’s spent the last 20 minutes not answering the door, and her partner is home to keep the kids out of the way as required. If her offspring show up at the door that’s on her. If they’re not wearing shoes that is definitely on her. Like all this tweet really says is “I brought my son to the door to meet police serving a warrant and they ignored him and walked in”.
I like how you don’t even pretend to read it, and got all huffy about being linked to an NRO article… while you seem to have no objection afaict to the NRO.
This anti-NRO thing is precisely the same as Trumpkins refusing to read “fake news” site they don’t like, complete with justifications like this:
Wait, you mean NRO is a right-wing outlet? Gasp.
I mean you know what you’re getting with NRO. They are the conservative intelligentsia’s spin-doctors, they will ignore inconvenient facts when it pleases them, but they’re not Gateway Pundit, they play generally within the space of factual journalism. The same can’t be said for Rebekah.
Really think about what it takes to file a bogus application for a restraining order (against someone you don’t like because they wrote an article critical of you) on a Friday night, so that you have the weekend to file a complaint about them breaking it, then use a screenshot of this complaint to claim that this person is under criminal investigation for stalking you TWO WEEKS after your interim order was struck down. It appears that the entire reason Rebekah filed in Maryland is because of the way that state handles the interim orders. She lives in Florida and Christina’s bio has her dividing her time between Florida, Georgia and D.C., so the natural place to file would have been Florida. If you can think about the mentality of someone who does that and then be like “what about the credibility of the NRO tho” then I don’t get it. If your ideology heuristic for determining who to take seriously doesn’t break down now, when would it break down?
Dude, give me a fucking break. Seriously. That’s ludicrously dishonest and insults the intelligence of every single person who reads it.
Since you quoted me, you failed to point out how I said I had no clue what “NRO” is and still don’t, but that you could read the first couple sentences and think “lol this article is clearly biased and written by a silly goose” and you should probably just close it and find something else to use to make your point.
This holds true for both silly left and right “leaning” sources.
How is this even a hot take?
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What are you even saying? Why would I pretend to have read it when I hadn’t read it at the time? It’s almost 10,000 words. I looked at it when it was posted to see if it was a reasonable thing to read while I was walking the dog and nope, 10k words of crazy-grifter typography. Also I lost some time because RJ says something in her intro about “salacious, highly-sexualized” language in the NRO piece, so I went back to reread that to try to figure out what was going on, and then I decided that wasn’t going to happen before the dog did her business.
Having read it, I think it would have been a lot less tedious if it consisted only of the parts that were ghostwritten by her lawyer. I remain more committed than ever to my belief that Rebekah Jones is on the grift.
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This whole spot is really dangerous and is a valuable place to learn an important lesson.
Just because someone is nominally on your side doesn’t mean you want to defend them.
Rebekah Jones gives off all kinds of scammer vibes to me. She’s the kind of person I make a point of never being involved with. I think she’s very problematic because she shares enemies with us and that can make defending her seem to make sense… but in reality any fight to defend her has to be fought on lousy factual terrain and will only make the other side seem more credible.
She’s making the fucking NRO look good ITT. I think that’s an excellent example of what I’m talking about. I have zero interest in having any arguments with propagandists where they can pull me down to their level. Just abandon these people to the sharks circling them. We (and here I’m speaking from the perspective of the left in America) don’t have a dog in this fight and we should leave it that way.
This is also why I have very little patience for leftists massaging stats the way the right loves to. We lose a lot of value using their tactics in those spots when the stats strongly favor us. It weakens the value of facts when the facts are almost entirely on our side in 2021.