But "[t]his court has consistently rejected [this] general argument: that a sentence is substantively unreasonable whenever a district court considers conduct in imposing a variance that was already used to calculate the Guidelines range." United States v. Heard, 749 F. App'x 367, 372 (6th Cir. 2018) (collecting cases); see also id. at 381 ("Double-counting is not, in and of itself, a problem.") (Moore, J., dissenting). So, Mr. Drake's argument that the variance was unreasonable simply because the district court double-counted must fail.
Put simply, "the district court was imputing some nefarious conduct to [Hatcher] that the record simply does not support." United States v. Heard , 749 F. App'x 367, 384 (6th Cir. 2018) (Moore, J., dissenting). To rely on such an inference based on a complete absence of record evidence was plain error.