(still working on these sections and additional sections, but I think I've got this much of it ready to publish). Note: if you want to copy and paste this to save locally, click "source" at the bottom and copy that, so the embedded links will be included.
We do not advocate vigilantism, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty.
Disinformation Warning: Beware "black propaganda", a tactic used to disrupt and discredit our investigation. Black propaganda involves statements or actions which are made to appear to come from one side of a conflict, but actually come from the other side, like political ventriloquism. Disinformants, or "shills," anonymously promote intentionally fake evidence and claims, which can then be used to paint our central thesis as false. People familiar with debate can think of it as a "straw man." This is not to say that legitimate researchers do not make mistakes, but to caution all readers that disinformants are actively attempting to disrupt this forum's efforts. However, all evidence included in this summary is directly verifiable through embedded weblinks.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND EXPLANATION OF PIZZAGATE
Introduction
This investigation was sparked by strange emails leaked from John Podesta's email account, some of which make bizarre references to food. These references make sense when we discover they involve known pedophile codewords like cheese pizza.
The suspected use of "pizza" as a codeword led us to investigate a pizza restaurant mentioned in one of Podesta's emails, namely Comet Pizza and Ping Pong, owned by an associate of the Podestas. We have found considerable evidence that Comet is a front for child sex trafficking.
- Exhibit A: Evidence Pertaining to Comet Pizza and Ping Pong
Comet owner James Alefantis had a statue of Antinous as his Instagram profile picture. Antinous was the boy lover of a Roman Emperor, and is considered a symbol of pederasty. On his "jimmycomet" Instagram account, Alefantis posted a picture of a baby, calling her sexually promiscuous. He also posted another baby picture and made a clear pedophile reference. The brother of Jeffrey B. Smith ("werkinonmahnightcheese"), who commented on several of the suspect Instagram photos, referred to a friend as "my favorite pedo".
Alefantis posted a photo of a child taped to a ping pong table, and a photo of a walk-in cooler, to which he commented "#murder" and to which Jeffrey B. Smith someone commented "#killroom." Alefantis also posted a picture of Tony Podesta’s sculpture modeled after a Dahmer victim, a picture of satan, and spiritcooking queen herself Marina Abramovic. In their washroom, Comet had a painting of a man playing ping pong, to which graffiti had been added to show him ejaculating on the table and wearing a Satanic upside-down cross. Comet had paintings of children with their heads cut off and murals in their restaurant of heads cut off.
Listed first on Comet's website under "friends of comet" is the band Heavy Breathing, which performs at Comet. Heavy Breathing leader "Majestic Ape" wears a ski mask and sunglasses, and uses a voice modulator, hiding his or her identity. Majestic Ape joked about pedophile Jared Fogle and said "we all have our preferences, hee hee hee". , bringing laughter from the audience. In another video, Majestic Ape talks about killing a baby. Majestic Ape also referenced pedophilia in a caption on a music video. Heavy Breathing's website features art involving both children and sex.
An employee of Comet posted many images portraying pizza in a sexual way., further fueling our suspicion they are using "pizza" as it is commonly used by pedophiles: a symbol and codeword for sex with minors. Another example.
Please examine these symbols designated by the FBI as pedophile symbols. Besta Pizza, which is three doors down from Comet, had a logo that is a near-exact match of the boylover symbol. Another nearby business, Terasol, had a girl-lover symbol on their website. No direct connection to Besta or Terasol has yet been uncovered, but the logos seem quite a coincidence. With that in mind, take a look at Comet's logo. It also resembles a pedophile symbol.
- Exhibit B: Evidence Pertaining to John and Tony Podesta
John Podesta is the former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, and was the Chair of Hillary Clinton's presidental campaign. Tony Podesta runs The Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm.
The Podestas are associates of James Alefantis, as detailed in Exhibit C. They are also good friends with known and admitted pedophile, former Republican congressman Dennis Hastert. John Podesta received en email suggesting that Hastert shoud vanish to an undisclosed Japanese island after the news of Hastert's pedophilia broke.
Now, let's discuss the specific emails that led to our investigation of Comet.
John Podesta received an email from Tam Luzzatto saying that children of ages 11, 9, and 7 will be "in the pool for further entertainment" and stating that the children "will definitely be in that pool".
In another email, Podesta was told that he left behind a black-and-white handkerchief "with a map that seems pizza-related". A handkerchief with a "pizza-related" map? What the...? It begins to make sense when we discover that handkerchiefs are sometimes used as code for sexual preferences,, and victims of pedophilia express that it’s collected as a souvenir after being placed under the victim. Black and white symbolize bdsm/domination and pedophilia, respectively. Furthermore, as discussed previously, "pizza" is a common codeword for child sex abuse. The meaning of "map" here is unclear.
In another suspiciously cryptic email, a friend complained that Podesta had changed "strategies that have long been in place" and remarked that Podesta sent him "cheese" instead of "pasta," asking if Podesta thought he would do better "playing dominoes on cheese than on pasta". Why would Podesta regularly send this person pasta, why would there need to be a strategy long in place for doing so, and who plays dominoes on cheese or pasta? "Cheese" is a known pedophile codeword for little girls, whereas "pasta" is a known codeword for little boys. "Dominoes" seems likely to be code for domination/bdsm, especially given other evidence pertaining to the Podestas, as detailed below.
Tony Podesta sent John Podesta an email titled "Last night was fun." The email read simply "still in the torture chamber".
One could argue this could have been a metaphor, but consider it in light of the fact that Tony Podesta collects art by Biljana Djurdjevic, which refernces or depicts extreme physical and sexual abuse of children. He also collects photos of naked teenagers, and he has a taste for art portraying cannibalism and murder, such as his headless Arch of Hysteria statue which seems to reproduce one of Jeffrey Dahmer's decapitated victims. John Podesta also likes artwork portraying cannibalism, such as this piece is in his office.
Also, consider the above in light of numerous references to Satanism and the Occult surrounding Comet Pizza and Ping Pong.
(continued in comments)
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heks_ ago
Good job on this. Just a couple thoughts...
PODESTA EMAILS
I agree with the recommendation of putting Podesta's emails up front. I think it's important for people to understand where this all originated, and that it was from people going through Podesta's emails and noticing a number of comments involving food, particularly pizza, that either seemed like gibberish when read literally, or just seemed to be talking about pizza in a way that humans don't typically talk about it.
So, unlike news reports that claim a bunch of conspiracy theorists just decided out of thin air that when he was talking about pizza it was a code for pedophilia, I think it's important that potential readers understand that the reason people came to believe that 'pizza' and other terms were code for pedophilia involved a two-step process, where 1) the determination that these terms seemed to be code came about because the statements that contained them simply didn't seem to make any sense when those terms were taken literally, and 2) the terms were suspected of specifically relating to pedophilia because those terms are already in use as part of an established slang/code used by pedophiles to refer to sex and to the age group and gender of kids. It can then be pointed out that this interpretation was given more weight by the discovery of the Luzzatto email that talked about sending pre-teen girls to a party at a farm where they would serve as entertainment in the heated pool, and by the further discovery that this woman ran a website where she advertised the opportunity for people to watch her underage granddaughter 'raw and uncut'.
ALEFANTIS INSTAGRAM
When it comes to the pics and comments on Alefantis' Instagram account, I think it's important to characterize them properly. Many people seem to be interpreting them as evidence of wrongdoing, and some even seem to be offering them as that to convince others. In my opinion, this is an incorrect and unhelpful characterization. When presented in that light they can be "debunked" by simply saying, "Naw, that little girl if fine ... I never touched her". In my view, the proper way to characterize them is as evidence of a common theme representative of Alefantis' state of mind. His pictures and comments show a common trend of associating kids and babies with sexualized terms and with money, and with rather oddly allowing and condoning [1] his employees' and friends' practice of associating his supposedly 'family-friendly' business with inappropriate sexual images that draw a correlation between pizza and sex, which is precisely the same connection that seems to exist in Podesta's emails.
[1] Alefantis commented on at least one of the bizzare images his restaurant was tagged in, simply saying 'sex', and the actual business Instagram account 'liked' a picture of the sexual graffiti in the bathroom that included the words, 'shut up and f#ck'.
JUNOAK ago
As a non-pizzagate believer the majority of conversations I have had have been about the instagram photos wrt alefantis. These have been conversations where the person, not me, will bring up the photos. People say that it is the tip of the iceberg but it leads me to asking the question is there any evidence that alefantis is a pedophile (has a sexual attraction to minors), much less acted on it? And there has never been a response.
heks_ ago
Yeah, I get where you're coming from, and in my opinion this is the problem with people either over-stating the case, mischaracterizing the nature of the evidence, or incorrectly representing the goal of this investigation (at least as I've come to understand it as someone who has been observing it with open-minded skepticism about its ultimate claims).
It seems to me that most people seriously investigating this issue will openly admit that there's no smoking gun here that definitively proves Alefantis or anyone else has actually molested (and potentially killed) children. The fact of the matter is that these people aren't completely stupid, so even if they really are guilty of the worst that is suspected it's highly unlikely that they will have left any such smoking guns in places where citizen investigators are likely to be able to come across them.
This is why I think it's important to properly classify and characterize the nature of the evidence. As I think most will admit, the evidence is circumstantial, but there is quite a lot of it. Also, in addition to simply classifying it as circumstantial, I think we can break it down into further categories.
First, there is evidence like the Instagram photos and comments, taste for a particular type of artwork, regular booking of particular bands, etc., that I think is properly characterized as evidence that goes to 'frame of mind' with respect to Alefantis, his friends and employees, and the Podestas. This is not evidence of wrongdoing, but it is suggestive of where their minds are at and where their tastes lie, and for some reason they all seem to have a taste for art (whether photos, paintings, performance art or music) that consistently revolves around the occult, murder and the depiction of children in a sexual context (often in BDSM-type scenarios) or in association with money. And we're not talking about one random outlier piece of art here. We're talking about a consistent theme that stands out on even a cursory examination. That, on its face, without considering anything else, is a cause for concern.
Second, we have evidence that seems to be suggestive of involvement in actual wrongdoing, but which remains circumstantial because, for the most part, it relies on the interpretation of certain statements as using a code. Now, as I kind of addressed in my original comment, suggesting that a code is involved here does not require some kind of crazy conspiracy theory, because the belief that a code is being used is not something pulled out thin air but is derived from the fact that when certain statements are read as though the words in them carry their normal meaning, the sentences simply don't make any sense or, at the very least seem incredibly unnatural. It's also not wildly speculative to interpret the code as relating specifically to pedophilia because the particular terms used in this apparent code are already known to be slang/code words used by pedophiles to refer to sex and to children. And, as I've already said, the apparently uncoded Luzzatto email talking about sending preteen girls as entertainment for the adults in the heated pool seems to further bolster this interpretation (to me, the Luzzatto email seems like a slip-up in sending an uncoded message about this stuff to Podesta's work email). We might also include in this category the seeming references to sex and pedophile logos used by Comet Ping Ping and some of the surrounding establishments.
So what we have here are two lines of different kinds of circumstantial evidence that are both pointing in the same direction of pedophilia with occultic overtones. The first line of evidence involves what appears to be coded (for the most part) references to actual wrongdoing, and the second line of evidence suggests that these people have a particular mindset that would be conducive to them carrying out the very type of wrongdoing that seems to be suggested by the first line of evidence.
And this brings us to the actual purpose of the citizen investigation that had been termed 'pizzagate'. It is not really an attempt to brand certain people as murderous pedophiles and convict them in the court of public opinion, though some individuals have apparently tried to do that. Rather, it is an attempt to gather enough publicly accessible evidence and bring enough attention to this issue to force authorities like the FBI to launch an official and public investigation to find out one way or the other whether these people are guilty of the things that this circumstantial evidence suggests they might be involved in, which, for goodness sake, we all hope they are not. At this point, hoping that the MSM might actually cover the issue honestly seems like a lost cause, but if the pressure is kept up it might just force the authorities to look at this seriously. And if these people are innocent, having a legitimate and transparent investigation that exonerates them would probably be the best thing for them, because without that this scandal will probably hang over their heads for the foreseeable future.
Take care non-believer ;)
JUNOAK ago
You probably realize this but just to make sure we're clear: because evidence wouldn't be there isn't evidence in itself. I would like to make an analogy here but that will just lead to something about invisible unicorns so I'll spare both of us.
I'm wondering what would constitute as "consistent" in this case. I think you would have to look at each individual and ask if this is normal for a person with their profession/interests. For instance did you know Tony Podesta is an art collector hobbyist? What would constitute consistent in that case? If he had 10 paintings that seemed to revolve around children in sexually promiscuous situations but his art collection was in the thousands, is that consistent? Also what was his motivation for buying those paintings, I would think that the artists purpose for creating it would be a big clue. What were they trying to communicate? The person buying the art could have a different perspective from the artist but you would have to make that case separately. I think in one article it said that Tony Podesta put up the sexualized paintings of kids in his bedroom, in that case it wouldn't really matter if he had a consistent behavior of buying this stuff since he has put an importance on these particular ones. But why did he?
I could come up with many reasons why something might write a sentence that sounds unnatural. Auto correct is a possibility. Being distracted is a possibility. The fact that we do not have context because we only have this one form of communication to view. Possibly they are generally a very busy person and are used to sending out quick short texts or emails which forces an unnatural type of sentence structure.
But you seem sure of one explanation for the unnatural sentences because you go on to say:
Is it a code though? How do you know when something is a code? Once you've found out it is a code then you can talk about figuring out what it means. IS it a code for drugs or what? How would you find out? And something I think is important to note is that at some point someone did a search for the term 'pizza' and then picked out all the instances that sounded unusual. People were specifically looking for unusual things in order to figure out if there was a code. The fact that there were unusual sentences can't be pointed to because that is what was specifically being searched for. You just have to ask yourself is there a greater amount of awkwardly phrased sentences here than there would be in any normal persons email. Then remember that there are thousands upon thousands of emails spanning more than a decade.
For the Luzzato email could you come up with the most mundane non-pedophilia related explanation for the email? What would it be and how likely would you say that explanation is? If you respond at all this is the thing I would like an answer to the most.
Lastly, I like generally the sentiment in the last paragraph but I'm not sure I like how you say that an investigation "would be good for them". Simply because an accusation exists doesn't put any obligation on the people accused, and I would argue that a 'suggestion' that insinuates a person submit to an investigation or continue to be labelled a child abuser is not actually a suggestion. Anything can be done in the name of 'saving the children'. A serious responsibility lies with people making an accusation, especially one involving heinous crimes of child abuse. But this is the internet and no one will come for the people who make false accusations. There won't be any consequences and then one day people will get bored and move on and there will be people left scarred with the pedophile accusation after a brief period when a mob decided to give themselves license to tear apart and scrutinize everything they've ever done or said.
heks_ ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Assuming I understand you, I think we're on the same page here. It would, of course, be absurd to argue as follows:
A) Even if pizzagate is true, we would not expect a citizen investigation to find a particular type of evidence B) The citizen investigation has not found that particular type of evidence C) Therefore, pizzagate is true.
That would be ridiculous. I'm certainly not advocating anything remotely resembling that. What I'm saying is that the mere failure (so far) of a citizen investigation to find evidence that we would not expect a citizen investigation to be able to find in the first place does not count as evidence that pizzagate is false. Pizzagate may be correct or it may be incorrect, but that needs to be determined (to the extent possible) on the basis of other information that is available to us. The absence of evidence for a theory only counts against the theory when the absent evidence is of a sort that we should positively expect to find were the theory true.
You've kinda got a lot of things packed in here.
First of all, with regards to consistency, I was referring more to the fact that we seem to see a consistent artistic taste that is shared by the people in question, where the themes of the occult, murder and children in sexual/BDSM scenarios seems to turn up as a common interest/taste. I'm not convinced that percentage of total artistic interest is an overly significant factor here (and BTW, yes, I was aware that Tony Podesta is an art collector). The articles I've read have seemed to indicate that we're not talking about single pieces here, and certainly that's true of Alefantis' Instagram account, and his friends/employees' accounts, and the bands he has in, and the art he has put on display, and the art he has been involved in producing. So we're not talking about one-off 'flukes' here (whatever a 'fluke' would be in the context of choosing art). When you collect multiple pieces of art (in whatever medium) that fall under a specific theme, it suggests you have an interest in the theme, and this remains true even if you have 500 other pieces of art on different themes. Being interested in a theme obviously doesn't mean that you have to be single-mindedly interested in the theme. Furthermore, the themes in question are themselves somewhat unusual with respect to general artistic interests in the population. Obviously, an interest in these artistic themes is not automatically some kind of signifier of that someone is guilty of anything, but it is unusual enough to be noteworthy, and especially so when these outlying artistic tastes just happen to be found in a group of closely connected people who are suspected of doing the very things that their artistic tastes depict.
Does this prove these people are guilty of something? No. Is it a smoking gun? No. Is it a noteworthy fact that should be included in weighing the plausibility of the pizzagate suspicions? Yes.
I think it really comes down to this question: Given the interest these people have demonstrated in art depicting or referencing the occult, murder and children in sexual/BDSM scenarios, do the pizzagate suspicions seem more plausible than they would have seemed if these people had not demonstrated any interest in such art?
People will have to decide that for themselves, but I think many people here have come down on the side of answering 'yes' to that question.
The question, though, is whether or not those types of explanations seem as plausible as the 'code words' explanation given the specific cases in question. We're not just talking about typos here, or strange/troubling words inserted auto-correct-style into normal and innocuous statements. If we're seeing auto-correct-style word replacements it's putting innocuous words into strange/troubling statements ("get a pizza for an hour"). In other cases, it's that the statement just seems incoherent when the words in them are taken literally ("Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?"). These statements, and others like them, are rather strange. They range from unnatural to essentially incoherent. In some cases, like "get a pizza for an hour", a fairly obvious context suggests itself apart from any knowledge of a preexisting code, namely, "get a girl for an hour". This may or may not be the correct interpretation. The thing is, it just so happens to assign to the word "pizza" precisely the meaning that it has in the already established pedo-code, where "pizza" means "girl". We can then try to translate the other more generally incoherent statement by supplying other connected code words in place of the suspect terms: "Do you think I'll do better playing domination/BDSM on a young girl than on a young boy"
Now, once again, I don't know that this interpretation is correct. I only know that it seems like the statements are using code words, that if a code is being used here, one of these statements suggests a specific meaning for the code word 'pizza' apart from any knowledge of a preexisting code, that this suggested meaning does correspond to an existing pedophile code, and that using that pedo-code to translate another strange food-related statement results in a meaning that seems more coherent than the original statement itself.
At this point we can reasonably ask ourselves about the inherent plausibility of this interpretation. For example, we can ask ourselves whether it seems plausible that pedophiles would communicate in code. And, of course, we already know that they do. We can also ourselves whether it seems plausible that they would communicate in a code that consists of food-related terms, like "pizza", "pasta", "cheese", etc. And, of course, we know that they would not only communicate in a code that uses words like that, but that they communicate in a code that actually uses those specific terms. We can also ask whether it's plausible that political elites and their close associates would be involved in pedophilia. And, of course, we have ample evidence from recent history around the world that shows it's not only plausible but common. So the pedophile-code interpretation of these emails is not, in itself, inherently implausible. That doesn't mean it's necessarily true, but it means that it is not obviously silly, and cannot simply be waved off due to some obvious inherent implausibility.
We can then also ask whether the interpretation seems plausible given the specific people involved. This is always going to be sketchy, because even people who seem squeaky-clean and like they would never be involved in child abuse do sometimes turn out to be pedophiles. So the question is really whether or not we have information that stands out to us as making this theory/interpretation more plausible than it would be in the absence of that information, and this is where we might take note of the artistic predilections of these people, which appears to show an interest in the depictions of child abuse and connected subject matter, whether sly or bold. We might also consider the Luzzatto email that speaks of sending pre-teen girls to a party at a farm to serve as entertainment for the adults in a heated pool while making a point of listing their very young ages.
(continued in reply to this comment)
heks_ ago
(continued from parent comment)
Once again, I'm not saying this is determinative. What I'm saying is that the interpretation that we're seeing use of a pedophile code in John Podesta's emails, whether true or false, is not obviously absurd or inherently implausible, nor is it baseless or pulled out of thin air. It might be wrong, but it's not obviously silly or frivolous. Furthermore, I'm saying that when you have a group of people who you think might be involved in pedophilia and you're weighing the plausibility of that suspicion, most people are going to find it more plausible than they otherwise would have when they find out that these people 1) seem to have a taste for art depicting pedophilic scenarios, and 2) have received an email that, on its face, reads like an almost explicit description of setting the stage for child sex abuse at a secluded party. None of this is a smoking gun, but taken together it is suggestive and troubling.
Not at all. I'm not saying I'm sure of anything. If you look at the context of the statement you quoted I think you'll realize that I'm making a conditional statement predicated on accepting the prior conditional statement.
In other words, I was saying that 1) It may or may not be a code, but interpreting it as a code is not just a completely baseless conspiracy theory pulled out of thin air, and 2) If it is a code, it's not wildly speculative to interpret it as being about pedophilia
If you're search for unusual sentences, that means you need to be especially aware of confirmation bias. It does not mean you can't point to the fact that certain statements really do seem to be unusual in a way that suggests they might be employing a code.
Now, if it is a code, could it be a code for drugs? Perhaps. I think you'd have to weigh the plausibility of that interpretation vs. the pedophilia interpretation given whatever other information has been discovered. I'd be quite happy if it was drugs rather than pedophilia. I'd be quite happy if it was nothing at all. I have no political axe to grind here. I'm apolitical. I care about what's true and I care about people's positions on issues being accurately represented, whether I agree with them or not. In fact, it would probably be fair to say that my main interest in pizzagate lies in the way that the MSM and other critics have unfairly misrepresented the nature of the core citizen investigation going on here, as well as how they have simply dismissed this whole affair as being definitively 'debunked' without ever accurately conveying the nature of the arguments, the reasons being cited for the suspicions, or the historical precedent for this kind of thing, much less offering any powerful argument for why such an investigation should be summarily dismissed.
Look, it's simple to come up with a non-pedophile explanation for the email when you're specifically trying to come up with a non-pedophile explanation. You could just decide that it means she's sending some kids to a totally normal party and they're going to go swimming. The problem is that this kind of interpretation results from saying, "If we take pedophilia off the table, what is the next most plausible interpretation of the email?" There is very little limit on our ability to offer plausible-sounding alternative explanations for something when the most straight-forward explanation is placed out-of-bounds. The real question is how a reasonably intelligent person reading this email would most naturally interpret it even if they weren't aware of the suspicions currently surrounding the Podestas. As a reasonably intelligent person myself, I can tell you that if I just stumbled across this email I would be asking what the hell I was reading, because on its face it sounds like a woman sending some pre-teen girls to a secluded adult party for sex. And if I happened to find out that this woman had a website where she advertised watching 'raw and uncut' video of these young girls it would only bolster that initial interpretation. Now, does this mean that the initial interpretation is correct? No. But it is a prima facie plausible interpretation. And at some point we have to take note of how often we find ourselves saying, "Is it clear proof? No, but..."
I completely agree. The reason I said what I did was because I was (implicitly) referring to the fact that we live in a culture now where the mere insinuation of either rape or child abuse is enough to tarnish a person for life. I am not for that at all. I strongly believe that people should be considered innocent until proven guilty. People do make false accusations. And sometimes the stars of circumstantial evidence really do align against innocent people. I am perfectly open to the possibility that that is happening here. I'm also perfectly open the possibility the pizzagate is absolutely right. I think there's an unusual amount of coincidences and circumstantial evidence here suggesting that these people have some involvement in occultic pedophilia. I just as strongly maintain the view that they are absolutely innocent of these accusations until they are proven guilty of them beyond a reasonable doubt. If I bumped into Alefantis or Podesta tomorrow, I would not think to myself, "I'm talking to a pedophile". Instead, I would think to myself, "I'm talking to someone who is suspected of being a pedophile", but those two propositions are universes apart for me and I would have no problem treating them or thinking of them as innocent until proven guilty, even though I'm in favor of an investigation being launched into these suspicions because I think there's enough circumstantial evidence to warrant one. In an ideal world, investigations like pizzagate, whether citizen-based or official, could be conducted and everybody could remain impartial and the people under suspicion could not have their character tarnished at all until and unless they were proven to have actually done something wrong [1]. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in, so we have to weigh the severity of the potential crimes suspected of being committed against the risk of damaging someone's reputation, and when the lives of children hang in the balance, the former is generally going to outweigh the latter. Unfortunately for Podesta and Alefantis, I don't think the media coverage has truly done them any service. Nor did Podesta help himself by disappearing for a month or more and never bothering to even deny the charges. Nor did Alefantis help himself by trying to debunk the charges by appealing to a misleading half-truth (i.e. 'It can't be true because Comet Ping Pong doesn't even have a basement' [oh, but the other restaurant I own right next door does])
So coming back to the point, the reason I said an investigation might be the best thing for them now if they are innocent is not because I think they have a requirement to submit themselves to an investigation in order to be presumed innocent, but because the way things have unfolded, the suspicion surrounding them has only grown and doesn't show signs of going away. So, whether right or wrong, if they're innocent, an official transparent investigation that exonerates them might be the only way to get them out from under the shadow of this thing. Unfortunately, even that is questionable, because the media has so discredited itself over the past year and on this issue in particular that they can't be trusted to report on it honestly, and the authorities have a long history of covering this kind of thing up when it implicates the elites and their friends.
I may or may not engage on this subject further. I seem to spending more time on it lately than I can spare and I'm not sure that anyone is really finding my contributions here useful since I'm not actively engaged in any investigation.
[1] Obviously in an ideal world this kind of thing wouldn't happen at all, but I'm sure you know what I mean.