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Friday, August 05, 2005

False Claim to Congress => Perjury Probe

Yesterday's WaPo has an article with this sentence:
Congress will investigate whether [Person X] perjured himself when he told [a Congressional] committee [something that may not be true].
Ok, that makes sense. On his Senate questionnaire concerning his nomination to be UN Ambassador, John Bolton provided an "inaccurate" answer to a question concerning whether he'd been interviewed by any Inspector General. The questionnaire is submitted with a sworn affidavit attesting to the accuracy of the answers. No one questions the fact that Bolton's answer was inaccurate.

Perhaps Bolton just forgot about the IG interview about one of the most reported and discussed issues flowing from the lies and distortions that enabled the Bush Administration's Iraq invasion (the IG investigation concerned the issue of Niger and uranium). Seems unlikely, but possible. Surely it is reasonable to leave open this possibility while Senator Richard Lugar's Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigates his "inaccurate" answer.

Because the quote from the WaPo article actually reads
Congress will investigate whether John Bolton perjured himself when he told the Senate Foreign Relations committee that he had not been interviewed by an IG in the preceding five years, something which is not true.
Right?

Wrong. The quote is actually
Congress will investigate whether baseball slugger Rafael Palmeiro perjured himself when he told a House committee that he hadn't taken steroids.
This is what we've come to under the hypocritical "leadership" of Congressional Republicans.

4 Comments:

Blogger Jonah B. Gelbach said...

It's precisely proportionality that militates against your argument.

Steroid use in pro baseball hardly comes anywhere near the importance level of being in deep in a conspiracy to lead the nation to war on false pretenses.

Perhaps the GOP apologists on the SFRC -- and the rest of them in the Senate -- would have been indifferent to knowing details of the IG investigation as it pertained to Bolton.

But the Dems certainly were entitled to know about whatever Bolton's role was, and they might have turned up more information had they known. Maybe someone else would have shown the sort of judgment that Voinovich did had they known earlier. (In fact, once the word came out about Bolton's "inaccuracy", Linc Chafee finally changed his mind and announced his opposition to Bolton.)

Lastly, as I understand things, Biden didn't know the answer "already" until long after Bolton's live testimony.

8/05/2005 12:08 PM  
Blogger Jonah B. Gelbach said...

thanks, s4. :-)

8/05/2005 3:27 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Well done.

8/05/2005 8:15 PM  
Blogger Jonah B. Gelbach said...

someone should get his meds adjusted

8/11/2005 12:51 PM  

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