If Sessions didn’t cross the perjury line, he definitely walked right up to it Under the statute, you have to willfully deceive Congress - to know that what you were saying was untrue, and say it anyway. Simply making a false statement to Congress isn’t enough to make you guilty of perjury. There is a very strong chance Sessions committed perjury That might just be the beginning: a special prosecutor could be appointed, or, even worse, the Senate could begin something called “contempt of Congress” proceedings.Īnd the consequences could extend beyond Sessions - potentially landing any Trump administration officials who helped him prepare his testimony in legal trouble. But there already have been consequences for him: on Thursday afternoon, Sessions announced that he would be recusing himself from any future investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s very unlikely that Sessions will be prosecuted under laws criminalizing perjury, owing both to laws protecting sitting Congress members (which he was at the time of testimony) and due to the difficulty of proving a lie. “I think a jury presented with evidence that he did have meetings with the Russians during the relevant time period could conclude that he perjured himself in front of the Senate committee,” Stuart Green, a law professor at Rutgers who studies the law of lying, wrote via email. The general sense was that if Sessions didn’t commit outright perjury, he came uncomfortably close. The million-dollar questions: Did Sessions break the law? And, if so, could he lose his job - or even be charged with perjury like someone who lied in court? To find out, we reached out to several legal experts who study relevant topics. During his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified, under oath, that “I did not have communications with the Russians.” We now know, thanks to the Washington Post, that this is false: Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the US twice in the past year, when he was serving as both a Trump adviser and a US senator.
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