[yebyen]

Sure. Somebody made up their mind what they wanted to do, they were required by law to seek public comments.

That 98% of unique comments and an overwhelming majority of public discussion were on one side of the issue, and they were then overwhelmed by obviously fake comments on the other side of the issue very conveniently allowed Pai to say "the results of the comment period are invalid, so we're going to disregard the comments and do what we had already planned to do anyway"

Given the track record of this administration so far, I feel pretty comfortable extrapolating from limited data and drawing conclusions that would not hold up in a court of law. Unless these folks are suddenly becoming much smarter than they look, chances are this will either be proven soon, or more likely swept under the next larger scandal.

Hopefully we can also agree that they were not going to listen to the public and knew before the comment period had even opened what they would do, and wouldn't be stopped. But in the realm of things we can prove, they definitely did not want to acknowledge the difference between what happened and "what happened." It played strongly to their advantage and successfully muddied the waters in furtherance of their stated goals.