You say that, but Perjury Traps are a real thing.
So is entrapment, but that doesn’t mean I should necessarily believe it when the bank robbers claim they were entrapped.
Probably because entrapment is well defined, unlike §1001.
No. Because you’ll almost certainly find that Stone (like Papadopolous, and Gates, and Manafort) told material lies about what he did and didn’t do, and got caught in them. If what Stone did wasn’t a crime — if he didn’t have some sense of guilt — then why lie about it? It won’t be the case that the FBI picked some trivial, unimportant fact that he was unlikely to remember well, and chose that fact as the thing they used to catch him in a lie.
Edit: Well, not Stone (yet), but Corsi.
Indeed, here is the critical line from that Popehat tweetstorm:
In fact, using interviews to create criminal liability is a primary feature of federal criminal investigation.
This is bullshit and will eventually make everything police do more difficult. The only correct response when talking to the FBI, or any federal investigator, is “lawyer.” This is true even if you’re only being called in as a witness. It really shouldn’t be illegal to lie to the FBI unless you’re under oath giving a deposition. And even then, inconsequential lies and lapses of memory shouldn’t result in criminal culpability… but they do.
Is there data on how often ‘inconsequential lies’ are prosecuted as crimes?
I don’t know, but isn’t the fact that it is done and that the law allows it enough to be wary of it. The FBI can lie to you all it wants: they can claim to have evidence they don’t, testimony they’ve never heard, can prove something they can’t. They don’t have to read you your rights or inform you that your words can be used to convict you unless they take you into custody. This kind of authority shouldn’t be celebrated, even if it results in indictments of people we think are bad. I think you should have to be warned whenever you’ve entered a situation where you expose yourself to perjury charges, and you should be encouraged to have a lawyer present.
Memory lapses are not illegal, you’ll never get caught for perjury simply because you misremember something.
In terms of conscious lies… there are no inconsequential ones when you’re talking to the FBI.
If Whitaker ends up recusing himself from the Mueller investigation, it’s gonna be
Trump would lose his shit so bad.
If he recuses it will be too funny.
Trump will start to believe there’s a full-blown conspiracy against him. He might very well go crazy. Watch him ask for a Geiger Counter so he can check for polonium.
Multiple sources reporting that indictments from Mueller coming today. Who’s on the hot seat this time?
I’m not celebrating it. I’m simply saying that it’s not true that the lies that Papadopolous and others told were simply the result of them being tricked. Papadopolous lied deliberately, repeatedly and consistently about the things he’d done. No trap was needed, and the lies were material, not incidental.
I don’t understand this point of view. You don’t think that knowingly giving a false statement to investigators for the purpose of misleading them should be a criminal act?
What sources, do you know? I only ask because Mueller runs a tight ship, so I always wait to get my hopes up when I hear stuff like this.
Looks like CBS is the primary source (saying “as early as today”), while Daily Kos says news crews are assembling at the Federal Courthouse. Might be everyone chasing their own tails. We’ll see.
https://twitter.com/NorahODonnell/status/1062319008341463042
My general understanding is that once they have indictments there’s all kinds of steps around filing them and such and that information is much more widely shared since it is the process of publicizing things in general. Not the details of them, just a lot of people are notified that new indictments of some kind are planned to be filed.
I imagine it’ll be more peripheral type folks again, but none of the really big names we really want to see in there. Some Russian guy living in Finland, a random former Trump associate in NY that no one’s heard of, etc.
Yes exactly. Or at least the crime should be redefined so that it’s very difficult to prosecute and not that serious. As it stands right now it’s trivially easy for the FBI to entrap anyone they want to into a felony at any time they want to.
Perhaps if the severity were linked to the severity of another crime, so that lying about a felony was a felony?