Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (5190)	9/24/1998 4:57:00 PM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Playing games with what the meaning of "is" is, is perfectly OK --the Supremes. For the many on the right wing who have followed their talking head heroes in ridiculing the President for saying it depends on what the meaning of "is" is, here are some excerpts from an article in today's Washington Post: In a now-infamous statement, Clinton told the grand jury that one of his denials in the deposition was literally truthful because the question was asked in the present tense and indeed, by the time of the deposition, his intimate relationship with Lewinsky had long since ended. "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," Clinton said. "Actually, in the present tense, that is an accurate statement." The president appears to have studied the law well. In a 1973 decision, the Supreme Court dismissed a perjury conviction against a witness who made a statement that was accurate in the present tense but was otherwise clearly false and misleading. "The burden is on the questioner to pin the witness down to the specific object of the questioner's inquiry," wrote Chief Justice Warren E. Burger for a unanimous court [emphasis added]. As I have said several times, the President was exactly right, legally. Which is what any argument that he should be impeached for the committing the crime of perjury must be all about -- the exact legal standards. And even morally, why on earth should he have helped Paula Jones lawyers in their campaign to smear him through the fruits of their dragnet of immaterial testimony? He was both legally and morally entitled to mislead them. Another passage from the same article: For centuries, Anglo-American courts have erected stiff hurdles against perjury prosecutions in part so that witnesses will not fear that a misstatement would expose them to prosecution. In a trial system that permits opposing lawyers to grill each other's witnesses, the chief safeguard against deliberate lies is supposed to be careful questioning -- not the threat of a perjury prosecution. And again from that same article, here's a much fuller account of the leading Supreme Court perjury case involving questioning about Swiss bank accounts, which I have partially described several times: The Supreme Court case grew out of a 1966 bankruptcy proceeding in which creditors were trying to show that Samuel Bronston, a movie producer, had hidden money in Swiss bank accounts. A lawyer for one creditor questioned the defendant: "Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss Banks, Mr. Bronston?" "No, sir." "Have you ever?" "The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich." Bronston's first answer was literally true -- he did not have a personal Swiss account at the time of the questioning [emphasis added]. But prosecutors discovered Bronston had kept large sums in a personal bank account in Switzerland for five years until 1964. The clever defendant's second answer also was literally true. The question was about personal accounts and the answer was about a company account. Nonetheless, Bronston was convicted of perjury because he gave an answer that was "not literally false, but when considered in the context in which it was given [emphasis added - does Judge Napolitano's argument come to mind?] nonetheless constituted a false statement." When the Supreme Court agreed to review Bronston's conviction, the Justice Department argued that his testimony fell into a category of perjury defined as "intentionally misleading responses with an especially strong tendency to mislead the questioner." The court rejected this argument and reversed the conviction. Bronston's answers appeared "shrewdly calculated to evade," Burger granted, but "any special problems arising from the literally true but unresponsive answer are to be remedied through the 'questioner's acuity' and not by a federal perjury prosecution."[emphasis added] Doug