What a baseless accusation re manipulating the scores.
(The overall scores were close, but it is a huge leap to assume that the judges were colluding to give the U.S. three spots.)
Skating order Group 2
Balde
Reynolds
Righini
Nguyen
Hendrix
Caluza
Skating order Group 3 (penultimate group)
Aaron
Besseghier
Abbott
Bychenko
Liebers
Kovtun
Skating order in Group 4 final group:
Verner
Machida
Han
Yuzuru
Kozuka
Fernandez
8th, 9th, 10th was Aaron, Besseghier and Verner. Aaron (9th after the SP) went first in Group 3. He was first with 225.26 (147.34). Bessegheir (10th after the SP) beat Aaron in the FS by just a hair (147.39) but was behind by a hair due to Aaron's slight lead during the SP. Abbott (8th in the SP) than went and skated an excellent FS (166.68; 246.35 overall).
But there was no guarantees that Aaron would finish 8th or Jeremy finish 5th as there were still 9 people to skate after them and 7 who had the scores to beat Abbott, if not Abbott and Aaron.
The placements came as they were because:
* Kovtun skated well (nearly same TES as Jeremy), but judges gave Jeremy the edge on PCS (5th; 162.74). But Kovtun had a lead on Jeremy, which lead to him finishing ahead of him. At the end of the group it was Kovtun, Abbott, Aaron, Bessegheir, Reynolds, Nguyen. The two later skated in the 2nd group in 15th and 16th respectively).
* Verner, who first in the final group had a very poor FS. He scored just 134.06, placing him 15th in the FS and dropping him to 10th, behind Aaron and Besseghier (and Abbott obviously), but ahead of Reynolds and Nugyen.
* Han, who was 5th in the SP, also made several errors in his program, finished 11th in the FS (146.21) and finished behind Abbott overall (7th).
* Kozuka, who was 6th in the SP, also had technical issues, finished 8th in the FS (152.48) and behind Abbott overall (6th; 238.02.)
So basically, Aaron and Abbott played the waiting game, and had help from poor performances from Verner, Han and Kozuka. The judges did not give Aaron super high scores (147+ is well below his PB) , so to say that some how the judges had a plan to give U.S. three spots is crazy. Sometimes in sports, at the end of the day, you just have messy victories. And that happened to be one of them.