Not always. Sometimes, as in Scooter Libby’s case, you make a statement, they pressure somebody else to say it was incorrect, you go to jail.
It is called “a process crime”.
They ask you what time it is and if you give them the wrong answer, then “YOU LIED” … and off to prison you go.
In the case of Scooter Libby, they KNEW the truth but they maneuvered Libby into making a “false statement”.
I was exceedingly disappointed that President Bush allowed Libby to take the false hit.
Libby was prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald, a longtime career prosecutor, appointed to investigate the leak of the CIA officer’s identity by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Comey went on to become FBI director and was fired by Trump, a move that led to the appointment of Robert Mueller, another former FBI director whom Trump almost daily accuses of conducting a “witch hunt.”
The saga that led up to Libby’s conviction began in 2003 when Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, wrote a New York Times op-ed column, contending that Cheney had deliberately ignored evidence showing that Iraq was not seeking to acquire material needed to build nuclear weapons.
Wilson’s claim, undercutting the justification for waging war against Iraq, was based on material he gathered in Niger for the CIA.
To undercut Wilson’s claim, administration officials told reporters that he had been sent on the fact-finding mission at the behest of his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked at the CIA.
Publication of that leak blew her cover, a potential federal crime. Libby was not charged with disclosing a CIA officer’s identity, however.
Nor was the man who actually did blow Plame’s cover, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But Armitage readily admitted his involvement to prosecutors and a grand jury.
Libby, however, was convicted on four counts of obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI and lying to the grand jury. He maintained that the differences between his testimony and others was just a matter of a different recollection of events.
[source:
President Trump Pardons 'Scooter' Libby, Former Cheney Chief Of Staff : NPR]
