The Reason Lincoln Had to Die

[mikegriffith1]

(12-31-2018 09:04 AM)Gene C Wrote:  

(12-31-2018 07:35 AM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  The diary "was not important to the government's case"? This is just laughable. Do you have any idea how many scholars have stated that Holt and Bingham most certainly should have entered the diary into evidence at the trial? In the near future, I will be citing just some of the scholars who have said so.

As usual, you insult someone's response, but never really address their response. You ask a lot of questions and just give us a lot of information, most if not all, does not address the issue at hand. "This is just laughable"

So getting back on subject, where in your post above do you tell us about the content of the diary that was important or would have helped the prosecution in the trial of the eight conspirators?

First off, as other scholars have noted and as Butler noted in his exchange with Bingham, in a military trial, the prosecution is obligated to present all the evidence, not just the evidence that favors their case. As many scholars have noted, Booth's statement in the diary that he did not consider killing Lincoln until the day of the assassination would have cast serious doubt on the case against Mary Surratt.

Booth's allusion to Seward's stabbing and his denial of responsibility for it certainly could have caused a stir. That denial makes total sense in hindsight. No one ever heard Booth say a word about Seward before April 14, and we have only two highly suspect second/third-hand accounts that he told Powell to kill Seward that day.

Booth's statement that he was thinking about returning to Washington to clear his name and that he felt he could partly clear his name if he returned became the focus of much debate after the diary was revealed. One perfectly logical interpretation of this statement is that Booth acted on behalf of certain powerful figures in Washington and that he could at least party clear his name by exposing them.

For anyone who is not blinded by Emperor's New Clothes allegiance to the War Department's version of events, it is not hard to see why Stanton and Holt et al suppressed the diary: It contained information that raised troubling questions and that cast doubt on the case against Mary Surratt. That's why they didn't even risk informing the judges on the military commission that they had the diary.

I notice you did not attempt to explain why anyone would have innocently edited Booth's diary in the way documented in the 1977 FBI report on the diary. Nobody surgically removes selected pages and shifts sections of text from one part to the other.

Even back when the diary was first released, people could see that a number of the missing pages clearly had had writing on them when they were torn out. Butler pointed this out in his exchange with Bingham, and Bingham never explained it. Butler could see that the 18 missing pages that had been detected had writing on their remaining edges. So obviously, the explanation that Booth tore out the pages to write notes to people won't work.

Finally, I notice you also declined to address the point that the Garretts saw Boyd (Booth in your version) writing in a black diary three days after the last entry in Booth's diary. If Boyd was Booth, where are those entries in Booth's extant diary? According to your theory, they should be there, but they're not. Why is that?