James Comey reportedly is being investigated for possibly lying to Congress during testimony in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.
The problem is that the DOJ isn’t as independent as people would like it to be, so you basically need a change in administration to hold someone to account, which could take longer than 5 years.
You can still run investigations in the meantime, though. Republicans are notorious for that. Even when they have no real power to do anything about it, they will investigate all the craziest shit that they can imagine…just to make it look like they’re doing something. Then when they have more control again, they have the option to pull the trigger or not.
Democrats should definitely take something from that playbook, but there’s been many cases of someone lying in front of Congress and not facing consequences. It happened in the leadup of both Iraq wars, and I don’t think people should just be allowed to get away with stuff like that just because the clock ran out.
Obviously part of the problem is that Democrats don’t seem to be interested in prosecuting stuff like that in the name of bipartisanship, but that’s how they got where they got now.
The biggest problem with all this stuff, is trying to prove that the person in question actually “lied” versus “I genuinely believed what I said at the time” versus “Oops, I was obviously mistaken”.
It’s impossible to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind, so unless you have some kind of date-stamped confession, that clearly contradicts their testimony…you’re never going to get a conviction.
The problem is that the DOJ isn’t as independent as people would like it to be, so you basically need a change in administration to hold someone to account, which could take longer than 5 years.
You can still run investigations in the meantime, though. Republicans are notorious for that. Even when they have no real power to do anything about it, they will investigate all the craziest shit that they can imagine…just to make it look like they’re doing something. Then when they have more control again, they have the option to pull the trigger or not.
Democrats should definitely take something from that playbook, but there’s been many cases of someone lying in front of Congress and not facing consequences. It happened in the leadup of both Iraq wars, and I don’t think people should just be allowed to get away with stuff like that just because the clock ran out.
Obviously part of the problem is that Democrats don’t seem to be interested in prosecuting stuff like that in the name of bipartisanship, but that’s how they got where they got now.
The biggest problem with all this stuff, is trying to prove that the person in question actually “lied” versus “I genuinely believed what I said at the time” versus “Oops, I was obviously mistaken”.
It’s impossible to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind, so unless you have some kind of date-stamped confession, that clearly contradicts their testimony…you’re never going to get a conviction.