When Is a "Literally True" Statement False and a Crime

[Shrek]

https://www.justsecurity.org/64145/when-is-a-literally-true-statement-false-and-a-crime/

On April 9, Rep. Charlie Crist asked Barr if he knew why “members of the Special Counsel’s team” were publicly reported to be saying that Barr’s March 24 summary of Robert Mueller’s report “does not adequately or accurately, necessarily, portray the report’s findings.” Barr replied in part, “No, I don’t.” We later learned that in a March 27 letter Mueller had complained to Barr that the March 24 summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions…. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.” Mueller used the plural: “We communicated that concern to the Department,” he told Barr. “We” includes his “team.” Yet Barr did not disclose the Mueller letter in his answer to Crist.

So was Barr’s answer a lie or merely incomplete? Barr has relied in part on the fact that Crist asked about complaints from “members of the Special Counsel’s team,” while the complaint Barr had earlier received was from Mueller himself, not his team. “I talked directly to Bob Mueller, not members of his team,” he told a skeptical Senator Patrick Leahy on May 1. In other words, Crist should have been more specific. To some lawyers, Barr’s answer might make perfect sense. A statement cannot be a lie if it is literally true.

But courts don’t agree. Just as in daily life, judges say that a literally true answer can nevertheless be false if the witness knows what the questioner is getting at and intends to mislead by exploiting an imprecise question.