The sycophants supporting Johnson this week have been embarrassing at times... in fact all the time. When he - finally, way after it was due, and far too late for consideration if this were an actual court - produced his defence statement the party line was as crude as "This clearly demonstrates he did not mislead parliament" - in other words apparently, the right-wing "flog em and hang em, they're all at it, guilty til proven innocent types" are now adopting the stance, in fact more than that, are demanding that everyone take the stance that we should take the word of the accused as gospel.
If a defendant says that he is not guilty then that's it, he's not guilty. I'm one of those who is certainly happy for there to be quite a high barrier for prosecutors to clear when they are attempting to prove guilt. This is simply due to the principle that someone being mistakenly found guilty is worse than someone being wrongly let off, as the former in fact includes the latter ie if someone is wrongly convicted of a crime that they did not commit, then the guilty party has automatically been wrongly cleared. I suppose this is only the case in neat, idealized crimes with a single perpetrator, but the point that it should require a high standard of evidence and ultimately be a non-trivial challenge to convict someone of a crime remains - however even I would draw a line at saying that we accept the innocence of any defendant who says he didn't do it.
There is of course a particularly irritating circularity to that argument when the very question is "Is the defendant a liar?".
Johnson's supporters on Twitter etc are constantly trying to destroy the credibility of the court...
From The Guardian; In one heated set of exchanges, Johnson refused to explicitly disown supporters, who have called the committee “a kangaroo court”, arguing that the best way the MPs could prove their fairness would be to exonerate him of any wrongdoing. Footage of the session showed his lawyer, Lord Pannick, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head.
On this issue the people can really be divided into two groups; the first group being those who know Johnson deliberately misled parliament and are happy to say so, and the second group consisting of people who know Johnson deliberately misled parliament but who find it politically or otherwise expedient to pretend they think he didn't.
