Perjury Just a 'Technicality'
"An indictment of any kind is not a guilty verdict, and I do think we have in this country the right to go to court and have due process and be innocent until proven guilty. And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury."Senator Hutchison made these comments last Sunday on Meet the Press. This comes from a woman who supported the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999, because he lied under oath.
--Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
"What would we be telling Americans, if the Senate of the United States were to conclude: The president lied under oath as an element of a scheme to obstruct the due process of law, but we chose to look the other way. I cannot make that choice. I cannot look away."In the case of the Valerie Plame leak investigation, what's good for the goose apparently isn't good for the gander, the ganders being Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Is perjury really nothing more than a "technicality," as Hutchison says? Or does it cut to the heart of our judicial system, and the shared belief that no man is above the law? Stephen Colbert had this take on the issue on Monday's The Colbert Report:
Perjury's not a real crime; it's just lying about a real crime. Like manslaughter. It's not murder; it's beating someone brutally in a drunken bar fight, and they just happen to die. You can't blame someone for that."
