Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Robert Mueller's Perjury Trap


The New York Times has just leaked the questions that Robert Muller wants to ask President Trump.

As a rule I do not comment on legal matters, and I will not make an exception here. I will, however, report the thinking of law professor Ann Althouse, to the effect that the questions, especially those that concern state of mind, are a perjury trap.

Althouse writes:

I cannot imagine trying to answer questions about what was going on in my mind at all these precise points in the past. Do you have access to the contents of your mind like that? Even when an interaction is happening, I don't have a clear, precise view of my own motivations and intentions. Thinking about it immediately afterwords, I might puzzle about it, even when I'm under no pressure and it's only one incident. But I would never be able — even if I believed I deserved no criminal punishment — to sit down to a high-stakes questioning about many interactions that occurred over the course of many months and purport to tell the truth about what I was thinking on all those occasions. There would be no way not to lie. Continually.

Her analysis keeps it in perspective.

1 comment: