Laptop serious enough to indict two FBI officials over becomes a coin that lost 99 percent in hours.

…(cont) Here's my one fixation, and I'm only going to say this once, then I'm leaving it alone till the very end, I promise you that. The Washington Examiner says these two had roles in the bureau's Foreign Influence Task Force, back in 2020, during the election. Not that they ran it. Not that they led it. That word, and nothing in front of it. I'm done with it till the end.

Now, the four papers covering this don't all say the same thing, and that's worth sitting with. The Examiner's got the Friday arrest and the task force. Fox says their testimony's come under scrutiny. The Post says they covered the thing up. Four different angles on one Friday. I'm not saying any one of them is wrong. I'm saying I noticed they don't line up into one sentence, and I wrote that down too.

The actual owner of the actual laptop put it on the actual market. A coin. Ticker symbol $LAPTOP, announced in early September. By Wednesday it had gone from thirty-seven dollars to two hundred twenty-two dollars inside the first hour of trading. By three that afternoon it was down to a dollar thirty-six. I did the arithmetic twice because I didn't believe myself the first time. Two twenty-two down to a dollar thirty-six is a loss of ninety-nine point four percent. I had it wrong the first time I wrote it down, so I wrote it down again.

So somewhere in that same calendar month, the government is building a federal case on how seriously the FBI took this laptop, serious enough that two people's liberty is now riding on the answer. And the man the laptop belongs to spent that same month selling pieces of it to strangers at two hundred twenty dollars a share, then watched it go to a dollar thirty-six by supper. I'm not telling you what to do with those two facts. I'm just telling you they're both there.

Oh — one more thing, before you go. What's the actual charge against these two? I looked it up. It's not the laptop. It's not the coin. The lying is the charge. The testimony is the charge.

Which brings me to the word I said I'd leave alone till now. The record never says what these two actually did at that task force. It gives you a plural noun and nothing else — no title, no rank, no job description. Whatever it cost two people to get that word wrong in front of Congress, it's still the only word on the page for what they did there. Roles.