The Awesome Power of Plausible Deniability

Context

One of the president's few core competencies is knowing how to operate under cover of plausible deniability. Plausible deniability (PD) can cover both legal and illegal activities. It is usually employed to cover embarrassing legal activities and illegal activities. However, PD can also be used to protect trade secrets and other forms of intellectual property, which is legal. Talent at creating strong PD shields is common and widespread among high level businessmen, crooks, tyrants and politicians. It is a way of life.

PD works very well most of the time because it is devilishly hard to dislodge. PD veils truth. Good practitioners of PD know not to leave any more of a tangible evidence trail than is absolutely necessary. The good practitioners do not take and keep written notes. The do not leave voice mail messages or ever send sensitive letters or emails. The good ones do all of their PD work in person whenever possible. They almost always shield tangible evidence they cannot avoid leaving behind using secrecy agreements.

In the case of the president, he speakes in code when it is time for dirty work that needs to be done. Even if someone had recorded him telling his employees to do something embarrassing or illegal, the president could deny that literal words were intended to get anyone to do any of it. For example, a Miami Herald article, Trump never told Cohen to lie — but suggested it by talking in code, Cohen says, focused on testimony by Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer, now a convicted felon. The MH wrote:

"Michael Cohen said in testimony to Congress on Wednesday that President Donald Trump never directly ordered him to lie, but instead made his wishes clear by speaking in “code” understood by anyone who works with him. 

“He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders, he speaks in a code. And I understand the code, because I’ve been around him for a decade,” testified Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal attorney. 

For example, Cohen said Trump would frequently remark that he had no business ties in Russia. Cohen said he understood Trump to mean that he should deny any such connections."

One other thing that PD requires when people are asking uncomfortable questions is lying. If the holder of the PD shield is asked questions and has to answer, the only way to leave the shield intact usually requires the shield holder to lie. The typical lie comes out as something like "I don't recall", "I'll look that up and get back to you", "I am not familiar with that", "We would never do such a thing", "I don't understand the details of that", "I don't know what you mean", and so forth. Most of the time, that is mostly or completely lies.

Plausible deniability professionals in action

An article published today in the New York Times, Grilled by Lawmakers, Big Tech Turns Up the Gaslight, describes in detail how the chief executives of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google wield their PD shields to try to keep congress from pursuing antitrust legislation. This is well worth being aware of. The NYT writes:

"When Mark Zuckerberg appeared in front of Congress two years ago, the Facebook chief executive’s memorable retort to a clueless questioner was “Senator, we run ads.” After Wednesday’s marathon appearance by Mr. Zuckerberg and three other tech titans at a House hearing on competition in the tech industry, a more fitting quote might be “Congresswoman, I’m not sure what you would mean by ‘threaten.’”

That was Mr. Zuckerberg’s evasive answer to a question asked by Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, about whether Facebook had ever threatened to squash smaller competitors by copying their products if they wouldn’t let Facebook acquire them.

It was a good question with a clear-cut answer. Facebook’s copy-and-crush approach has been well documented for years, and Ms. Jayapal brought even more receipts — previously undisclosed messages in which Mr. Zuckerberg issued thinly veiled threats to Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, about what would happen to his company if he refused to sell. 

An honest Mr. Zuckerberg might have replied, “Yes, Congresswoman, like most successful tech companies, we acquire potential competitors all the time, and copy the ones we can’t buy. That’s how we’ve avoided going extinct like MySpace or Friendster, and we’re about to do it again with Instagram Reels, our new TikTok clone.” That would have been an illuminating answer, and one that could have let lawmakers in on the kill-or-be-killed ethos of Silicon Valley. Instead, he dodged and weaved, trying to explain away the emails without admitting the obvious.

He did the same thing when Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, pressed him for answers about Facebook Research — an app that was used to snoop on users’ smartphone usage and give Facebook detailed data about its competitors. Mr. Zuckerberg initially said he wasn’t familiar with the app, even though Apple’s decision to bar it from its App Store nearly caused a meltdown at his company last year. (He later said he misspoke, and that he remembered it.)

The result was a hearing that, at times, felt less like a reckoning than an attempted gaslighting — a group of savvy executives trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence that their yearslong antitrust investigation had dug up wasn’t really evidence of anything.

At one point, Mr. Bezos was asked about a recent Wall Street Journal report that Amazon had set up a venture capital fund to invest in start-ups, only to then introduce its own versions of those start-ups’ products.

“I don’t know the specifics of that situation,” Mr. Bezos replied."

To prepare for the hearing, lawmakers obtained solid evidence of activities that may violate antitrust law. Because of that, the PD shields the CEOs raised were not very convincing. The NYT argues that the CEOs are not "sloppy or forgetful." The CEOs PD performance was not credible. The hearings indicate that the beginning of accountability for the abuses that tech giants have been getting  away with for years. The PD shield seems to be crumbling.

The morality of PD in situations like this is obvious, i.e., it is immoral when used to hide crimes. It hides and protects far too many white collar crimes and criminals.