If a deeply damaged person, a huckster or a psychopath, tells you a story, from their point of view and in a way that seems to make perfect sense, don’t forget Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s sound advice for judges:  what comports with common sense, what sets off your sniff detector, what does the storyteller have to gain, and lose, by telling the story the way he told it?

If you steal boxes of classified documents, some of which are eventually seized in a legal search by the FBI, proving that you have been lying in your negotiations with DOJ and that your lawyers swore, incorrectly/falsely, months earlier, that everything had been returned, although they prevented agents at that time from checking.   Not a promising scenario in court — unless you change the story to one that makes more sense to your needs.  

Here’s one: the FBI is lying, because of personal and political animus, another smelly, baseless partisan witch hunt, these people are vicious monsters who illegally stole MY stuff and won’t give it back.  Protecting my good name means much more than a bunch of spies being killed, or nuclear secrets of the US or our allies being sold, and the irreparable harm to ME is the most terrible thing ever, nobody’s ever seen harm like that before.

Or, in the case of a person no longer speaking to you:  YOU stopped speaking to me when you deliberately ended our friendship for no reason, you vicious, relentless fuck.

Take the sniff test on each of these scenarios.  Blow your nose.  Smell something you like.  Forget about it, but, of course, do not forget that many times when we are told a dodgy story, the narrator is unreliable.