is saying is make sure he doesn t step ten feet deep into their own legal jeopardy. that s their job. and the president touting his own skill at answering easy questions may come back to haunt him. all of us know a perjury trap is where prosecutors bring you in for no other ran than to try to trip you up so if they re just bringing you in, that s one thing, this is a very different context jim schultz, what would you have advised the president about statements about bob mueller? would you have tried to check him on the kinds of things he said about mueller being conflicted? all the negative and nasty things he said. would you have condoned that? i said time and time again there needs to be that that rhetoric needed to be dialed back by the president but as it relates to the investigation itself he has every right to be frustrated by this. it s dogged him from the
president said he would appear before the grand jury. that has never happened, he has been dealing with the kquestion that he is going to submit. i m very skeptical. when he says he answered them very easily, he says he thinks some of them may have been a perjury trap or tripped up. according to his lawyer, some of the questions create more legal more issues for us legally than others. he also said some were unnecessary, unplausible, traps, maybe some of them were ir relevant. are they supposed to be traps. they would never submit written questions that the suspect answers with his lawyer
sitting by his side. they issue a subpoena and they force you to answer. here regardless of what the president says, he answers them himself. they go through every phrase to make sure there is nothing incriminating and then there would be nothing submitted back to mueller. . i don t think that a perjury trap is possible when the lawyers are reviewing the annals. it is not for information, but merely to trap them into something that is untrue. that doesn t happen with written questions because the lawyers can go over and aguide a perjury trap. but the example he gave was not a perjury trap, the thing about the weather. if he had the weather wrong on the day, if he said is it a
that s not the standard for perjury. people can see the same thing differently and not be held accountable for perjury. that s like if someone was in court for a car crash and one said it s green and one says it s yellow, nobody is being convicted of perjury unless there s an intentional act of lying committed so there is a distinction to be made but a perjury trap is such a strong word and the one way to avoid it is tell the truth and not presume that by answering questions as the head of the speckive the branch which includes the department of justice somehow you are immune from doing that which every other witness is required to do. the president sees it a little bit differently. here s what he said. i m sure they re tricked up because they like to catch people, gee, was the weather sunny or was it rainy. he said it may have been a good day, it was raining, he told a lie, he perjured himself. do you agree with that characterization to use your
you at harvard law school. perjury trap, it s a phrase people throw around. i think it is literally a meaningless phrase because perjury and perjury. and this idea the president talked about it, if you say it was a sunny day and it was cloudy, they re going to charge you with perjury, of course not. perjury has to be a substantive statement that is relevant to a central issue in that case and it has ton an intentional falsehood, not a mistake. just because your testimony conflicts with another person, that doesn t mean either one of you is lying. perjury is about intentional lying, and it is rarely prosecuted, but it is prosecuted when prosecutors see it. they don t prosecute people who make mistakes. what s the best way to avoid perjury, by the way? tell the truth. these written answers, they re not the end here necessarily, they turn in the homework assignment, but the special counsel could come back