First, here’s my simple thesis: If you knowingly tell a lie
under oath to protect yourself or others from prosecution for a crime then you have
committed perjury, but if you and another person simply have a different recollection
about a person, place or thing, without malice or intent, you’re guilty only of
having a different opinion, and two people having conflicting opinions does not
rise to the level of a federal crime.
When two people disagree on something, we often call that a “he
said/he said” situation and it’s difficult to determine who is correct. It also
doesn’t prove that either party is lying or, in this case, committing perjury.
They simply disagree.
Now, here’s my exception: If you are known to be a
pathological liar who has publicly told more than 4,200 documented lies in the
past two years and continues on a regular basis to tell different versions of
the same story – all to protect yourself from legal or political liability and harm – and you
sit down with a prosecutor and tell stories that conflict with each other and
with all other available evidence, you’re probably guilty of perjury.
But have you been perjury-trapped? Or are you just a guilty narcissist
with a dictator complex who refuses to acknowledge that you have committed a
string of federal crimes and are inherently incapable of telling the truth for five full minutes in a row?
Let’s explore.
I have a good friend who has been my friend since first
grade more than 60 years ago. We share a lot of the same beliefs and opinions
and have lived complementary if not parallel lives. We went to high school
and college together, double-dated on occasion, have common friends, attended hundreds
of sporting events, played music together in a couple of “garage” bands and
continue to hang out to this day. In other words, we have 60-plus years of
shared memories.
As old friends do, we sometimes get together over a cold
beer or three and talk about the good old days. Sometimes we both remember
something silly we did and laugh about it together, but other times we remember
the story differently. He thinks it was raining and I say it was dry. He thinks
it was Saturday and I believe it was Thursday night. He thinks we went left and
I think we went right, so to speak.
So with our long, shared history, if you put us in front of
a grand jury and we were asked to recall the time, date, place and particulars of
a certain event, and our stories differed somewhat in detail, is one of us a
liar? Did someone commit perjury? Clearly we did not. We just remembered things
differently.
Then again, as far as I know, neither of us has ever conspired
with a foreign adversary to manipulate a presidential election.
I could go on and on about the unreliability of eyewitness
testimony – ask any cop or lawyer about that – or even about that game where
people get in a circle and whisper a story from person to person until it comes
out completely different at the end, but the point is simple. If you tell a
story that may not be true, even though you truly believe it is, you’re not necessarily
a liar or a perjurer. You may just be a guy with a foggy memory.
And if you are the faux-president of the United States, sworn
to uphold the Constitution and protect American citizens, and you’re asked to
tell your story to a federal prosecutor, you’re supposed to sit for the
interview, even though you may remember a few facts differently than someone
else, since we all know that can happen to anyone at any time because we’re all
just flawed human beings.
That is, you’re supposed to sit for the interview in the interest
of justice and the rule of law unless you’ve spent the past two years
concealing the fact that you’re a federal felon who has racked up an impressive
series of criminal violations, raped the U.S. Constitution and attempted to kick
our democracy to the curb while replacing it with autocratic rule, as if our free
and independent nation were, say, a shady New York real estate business or some
other financial scam.
In that case, you’d have a lot to hide, so you’d probably
want to duck out of your moral obligation to serve the people by ginning up
terms like “perjury trap” to avoid giving evidence and to make it seem like the
good guys are actually the bad guys and they are out to get you with malice in
their hearts and blood coming out of their eyes (or wherever). The world is an
unfair place, you believe, and you alone can fix it.
As long as you can avoid stepping into those imaginary traps.
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