In other news, Avenetti is a showboat and a slippery eel (can’t say I like him one bit), but a smart slippery showboat, I’ll hand him that (and smart beyond simply knowing what makes other showboats tick, which he also does in spades). The numbers he reported on Cohen’s payments from various sources were all wrong, and much lower than the actual values. Some of the American companies stepped in to correct the numbers since the story was already out there anyway (if you think you might be headed to court, it’s a good idea to be on the record stating the truth from the get-go). I’d like to have been the AT&T or Novartis rep who said “This story is incorrect – our bribe was triple the reported value.”

There’s some speculation about why he might have done this. It gave the story some extra legs on the news cycle, a second round with increased numbers. But I think it was more likely spycraft. If you get handed a sensitive leaked document, you do not post an image of that document (bad move, Reality Winner). You carefully paraphrase everything, re-using none of the original text. And unless the numbers are publicly available elsewhere, you change all the numbers too, so long as it doesn’t change the overall thrust of the story. Any verbatim text or even close numbers could potentially point back to the source. And now some of the correct numbers are available to the public, and Avenetti wasn’t the one who put them out there. Smooth.