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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (4890)	11/4/2005 1:14:39 AM
From: wonk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541503

…Reynolds made similar arguments directly, can you point me to where. I couldn't find them on Instapundit. I would have made a comment in response to the post if I did. All the concepts and quotations were in the posts, nevertheless I’ll summarize. 1. U.S. Code, Chapter 18, Sec. 1001 makes it a crime to lie to Congress; 2. It is a broad statute; 3. Congress knows it’s a broad statute but has not seen fit to change it; 4. Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) co-authored a book - (The Appearance of Impropriety) based in part on (or inspired by) Morgan’s earlier law journal article; 5. In Morgan’s original article, he argued – in John Dean’s paraphrase - that ... Morgan noted that the false statements statute even reaches "misrepresentations in a president's state of the union address." The original article: 1992, Peter W. Morgan, "The Undefined Crime of Lying to Congress: Ethics Reform and the Rule of Law," Northwestern University Law Review Hence, two known conservative authors have concluded that misrepresentations in the SOTU could be prosecuted under the False Statements statute. Hint: they don’t like the law. 64.233.161.104 That doesn’t mean that that interpretation of the law is correct, or if correct, would be upheld. Nevertheless we come full circle to the idea that an explicit “lie” is not required to potentially create legal jeopardy. Rather a knowing and willful misrepresentation would be sufficient. If the latter is true then we have a Howard Baker deja-vu moment: “What did the President know and when did he know it.” ww