As I set forth below, as a practical matter, I think Huckabee's defense on DuMond is so damning as to be almost indistinguishable from the charges leveled by his critics. But TPM Reader MR has a speculative but fairly convincing explanation of what may actually have happened ...

In your “Glass Half Full! No, Half Empty!” post I think you have missed what is likely the real story of what happened at the parole board meeting in question. I believe what went down is that Gov. Huckabee told the parole board that if they didn’t grant parole to Dumond, then he would commute his sentence. That is how he forced their hand on the parole, and it explains the statement that you included from “Team Huck.” This statement is a typical case of careful parsing, it is technically true, but misses the real point of what the meeting was about. I have no doubt that Mr. Chastain tried to talk Huck out of granting clemency, but he almost certainly didn’t want to grant parole to Dumond. He did it because they thought it better to have this man on parole and monitored then to have him released as a free man.