Does the Rule of Law Apply to Politicians and Elites?

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”
-- Sociologist Brooke Harrington commenting on how many very wealthy people see the rule of law

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”
-- President Richard Nixon commenting on the law and the president

In an interview on the NPR program Hidden Brain, sociologist Brooke Harrington discussed her experience as a financial advisor to extremely wealthy people. Harrington took classes to train herself as a financial advisor. In the interview, she noted that her clients generally viewed both the rule of law and government differently than most people understand it. In general, the financial advisor works to maintain secrecy about the scope and amount of the client’s wealth above all other considerations. They deal with family problems such as cutting family members out of the will and hiding assets from a spouse in advance of a divorce.

Other common tasks are minimizing taxes legally (tax avoidance) and hiding assets to illegally avoid paying taxes (tax evasion). She did not state if or how financial advisors avoid criminal liability for their help in tax evasion. She did not state if she participated in tax evasion. Presumably, some financial advisors show the client how to evade taxes and then turns a blind eye to the client when he (it is usually men) commits the crime.

The rule of law

At 13:20 of the interview, Harrington comments that one of the beliefs that very wealthy people tend to share is that the laws do not apply to them: “National boundaries and laws are all optional. Taxes are optional. All forms of law are essentially optional at that level of wealth.”

Government and society

At 14:05-15:50, she elaborated on attitudes toward paying taxes: “Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump. When I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart and if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyway. That was like, ‘Yup, he’s the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world.’ .... [Other financial advisors that Harrington spoke to said their clients] are very committed to neoliberal ideology and very committed to the idea that these elite clients are doing the world a favor as wealth creators and their initiatives should be protected against governments and what they regard as theft by taxation by incompetent governments that would just waste any money they collected anyways. They also by the way, regard redistribution of collected tax as immoral because it creates dependency on the part of the poor. .... There is a strong component of ideology here. You see it in the wealth management training program. ..... About a quarter of the people I interviewed really seemed to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft, and they view government as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. They are deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative.”

How the humans deal with the sleazeball

It is somewhat reassuring that only about a quarter of financial advisors feel that way. What do the others feel? At 16:25-18:00, Harrington commented about financial advisors who work for clients who cheat on taxes, wives and employees, i.e., sleazeballs: “Well, some of them don't [sleep well at night]. And I think that is one of the reasons we’re seeing a wave of leaks recently. Some people are so troubled by what they are seeing that they just can’t stomach it any longer and they blow the whistle, often with dire personal consequences. About a quarter of the people I interviewed I would characterize as being conscience-stricken about the larger impacts of their work.” She went on to comment that some advisors try to assuage their moral concerns by gently raising the problem with depriving the state of revenues by tax cheating, Those people risk losing clients who do not want to hear such things. Sleazeballs really do not care about people living in poverty.

Harrington is not the only one saying these things

A previous discussion based on the work of historian Nancy MacLean and her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, focused on the anti-government ideology that drives the modern republican party and populism. That mindset is in accord with how Harrington describes some of the very wealthy: “In the radical right vision, power would flow from the central federal government to authoritarian, oligarchic state governments that are captured by wealthy, powerful capitalists and like-minded individuals. The goal of that form of government is to weaken and then destroy the ability of average citizens, especially minorities to work together to defend their interests using equal protection and due process as their main tool to exert influence. The ultimate goal is to elevate property rights above all other rights, including the rights of people to tax property or otherwise burden it in any way.”

Another discussion based on journalist Jane Mayer and her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, sees the same thing: “Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.”

Obviously, not all wealthy people or corporations feel the same way about the rule of law, government and taxes. The question is, what portion do feel that way? The entire GOP has fallen to this radical anti-government ideology. The GOP is redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top, e.g., the 2017 tax cut law, where some wealthy people and corporations believe it belongs. Harrington’s comments about financial advisors suggest that at most, about 25% of them feel conscience-stricken, leaving the remaining 75% to be in full or partial accord with neoliberal anti-government ideology. Those people are helping to cheat governments worldwide out of trillions of tax dollars. And, where governments are corrupt, it is usually or always the same wealthy anti-government people and companies who are fully participating in and fomenting the corruption. That includes fomenting corruption in the US government.

From the not surprising things files: The FBI non-investigation of Brett Kavanaugh

 Vanity Fair writes:

THE FBI CONFIRMS ITS BRETT KAVANAUGH 

INVESTIGATION WAS A TOTAL SHAM

Oh, well, it’s not like he received a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court or anything.

That sense of outrage only deepened last year, when we learned that the FBI had received 4,500—4,500!—tips about Kavanaugh, which were referred to the White House, i.e. the organization trying to get the guy confirmed to the Court. And now, the FBI has confirmed that, yeah, it didn’t really feel the need to look into any of those tips, and when it did follow up on some, the White House was making sure it didn’t dig too far.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse uncovered the Republican cover-up while questioning FBI director Christ Wray.

Whitehouse: And I’d like to try to get that matter wrapped up. First, is it true that after Kavanaugh-related tips were separated from regular tip-line traffic, they were forwarded to White House counsel without investigation?

Wray: I apologize in advance that it has been frustrating for you. We have tried to be clear about our process. So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure that the White House had all the information we have, so when the hundreds of calls started coming in, we gathered those up, reviewed them, and provided them to the White House—

Whitehouse: Without investigation?

Wray [long pause]: We reviewed them and then provided them to—

Whitehouse: You reviewed them for purposes of separating them from tip-line traffic, but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?

Wray: Correct.

Whitehouse: Is it also true that, in that supplemental B.I. [background investigation], the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question, and even what questions the FBI could ask?

Wray: So, it is true that, consistent with the longstanding process that we have had going all the way back to at least the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and continue to follow currently under the Biden administration, that in a limited supplemental B.I., we take direction from the requesting entity, which in this case was the White House, as to what follow-up they want.

.... the “requesting entity” is the Donald Trump White House, which had a vested interest in not probing allegations of sexual misconduct, given who was running the joint.

Anyway, now Justice Beer Bong has helped take away the rights of half the country—and who knows what’s coming next!

And sadly, that is just how easy it is for a corrupt White House to subvert the rule of law, while deceiving and insulting the American people. 

One can reasonably argue that the morally rotted, beer boofing liar, Justice Beer Bong is illegitimate and a sexual predator. Impeach that toad. And fire whoever is left in government who was complicit. And, get rid of that asinine the longstanding process going all the way back to at least the Bush administration that allows a White House to subvert the rule of law.

Yeah right. That will happen when pigs fly. 

“The lives of the richest [and most powerful] people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.” -- Sociologist Brooke Harrington [and Germaine] 

 

Updates: Democracy and the law, the state of US democracy

Legal cases against Trump inch forward

Multiple sources are reporting that the last few days have been uniformly bad for Trump in five separate lawsuits. The Daily Beast writes:

In a matter of hours Tuesday, former President Donald Trump suffered humiliating defeats in courtrooms across the country that put him on track to have his personal taxes exposed, see his company dismantled, face a trial for an alleged rape, and confront the unencumbered power of the Department of Justice.  

In the midst of this maelstrom of legal trouble, the real estate mogul’s longtime personal accountant completely disavowed the company’s financial shenanigans, saying if he’d known the way executives were dodging taxes for years, he would have died of shock. “I probably would've had a heart attack,” Donald Bender testified in Manhattan criminal court, where the Trump Organization is defending itself at trial against the District Attorney’s Office.

What needs to be kept in mind is how successful Trump has been in gaming both the legal and business systems and getting away with it. Trump is second to none in breaking laws and contracts and getting away with it. 

He is equally expert at delay and stonewall tactics where patience, time and/or money simply run out for people in court trying to nail the bastard. Above the Law comments on this point:

Keeping it local, the fun picked up in the courtroom of New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, where Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba appears to have long since exhausted the court’s patience. And filing yet another motion to dismiss on the eve of the scheduling conference characterizing the detailed complaint filed by Attorney General Letitia James as “clumsily attempting to recharacterize decades of business transactions between highly sophisticated parties, only to succeed in establishing that she cannot plead a claim” did not help.

At one point, Habba suggested to Insider that Trump would actually take the stand in his own defense here. To which we would just note that the former president and his children litigated for years on end to avoid being deposed behind closed doors. And when they ran out of road, they largely took the Fifth. So … make of that one what you will.

Lat September, the ethics-focused CREW updated the list of 56 credible crime allegations since 2015. All 56 remain unindicted and unpunished. CREW wrote:

Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes

As of November 2022, Donald Trump has been credibly accused of committing at least 56 criminal offenses since he launched his campaign for president in 2015. That total only reflects allegations relating to his time in or running for office and omits, for instance, Trump’s criminal exposure for fraudulent business dealings.

A detailed table that CREW put together shows crimes that still can or cannot be prosecuted. All of Trump’s delays have served him very well. Nine of the 56 alleged crimes appear to be not prosecutable due to the statute of limitations having run. When in red, the column “likely deadline to file charges” indicates that the listed crime cannot be prosecuted because too much time has passed. That shows just how useless the rule of law and the court system is for rich and powerful elites. Some of the table of alleged crimes is shown below.

One can reasonably believe that many laws are either (i) intentionally written by rich and powerful people to preferentially protect rich and powerful people, or (ii) apply to everyone equally in theory but are enforced and prosecuted unequally. The US really does have a two-tiered system of law, an easier one for the elites and a much nastier one for the rest of us. Sociologist Brooke Harrington, tax advisor to wealthy people, once commented on this: 

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

Former president President Richard Nixon once expressed a similar sentiment when musing about himself:  

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

Maybe Trump did not have as nearly a bad a time in court the last few days as much of the reporting on it suggests. Every day that goes by where a crime is remains unindicted is another little win for the criminal. Every day not spent in jail is another little win.

The state US US democracy

One commentator cautions against getting too complacent in view of the results so far from the 2022 elections. The Guardian writes:

‘The US can still become a fascist country’: 

Frances Fox Piven’s midterms postmortem

The 90-year-old sociologist on ‘vengeance politics’, cruelty and climate change as she looks back on half a century of activism

“I don’t think this fight over elemental democracy is over, by any means,” she said. “The United States was well on the road to becoming a fascist country – and it still can become a fascist country.”

All the main elements are now in place, she said, for America to take a turn to the dark side. “There is the crazy mob, Maga; an elite that is oblivious to what is required for political stability; and a grab-it-and-run mentality that is very strong, very dangerous. I was very frightened about what would happen in the election, and it could still happen.”

“There’s going to be a lot of vengeance politics, a lot of efforts to get back at Joe Biden, idiot stuff. And that will rile up a lot of people. The Maga mob is not a majority of the American population by any stretch of the imagination, but the fascist mob don’t have to be the majority to set in motion the kinds of policies that crush democracy.”

That speaks for itself.

From the vexing matters files: The subjective nature of the rule of law

“This is an attempt to describe generally the process of legal reasoning in the field of case law, and in the interpretation of statutes and of the Constitution. It is important that the mechanism of legal reasoning should not be concealed by its pretense. The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community.” -- Former US Attorney General, Edward Levy,  An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, 1949

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.” -- Sociologist Brooke Harrington commenting on how many extremely wealthy people treat the rule of law, NPR interview, 2019

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” -- Richard Nixon 

NPR aired an interview yesterday (that I cannot find today) with a district attorney (DA) in Texas. The DA publicly stated he will not enforce Texas anti-abortion laws in his district. He claims that as a DA, he has discretion to decide what cases and laws to prosecute. NPR then spoke with a legal expert in Texas who concurred that a DA does have the discretion to decide what cases to prosecute and what to drop. So at least in Texas, the only obligation a DA has once police or other law enforcement presents evidence of a crime is to review the evidence and then decide whether to prosecute or not. 

The expert pointed out that it is not uncommon for DAs nationwide to not prosecute selected crimes. Sometimes a crime is not prosecuted because much or most of the community opposes the law. Sometimes it takes too much time and resource to prosecute a hard to prosecute or complex crime. That’s especially true for complex financial crimes and some (most?) white collar crimes where plausible deniability makes getting a criminal conviction impossible or almost impossible. 

The Texas DA said his concern was justice. In his opinion anti-abortion laws are an injustice. He risks his job to take that stand. Although I agree that anti-abortion laws are an injustice, what about the rule of law? 

The United States Attorney General (AG) also has discretion to enforce a law and to prosecute a crime. T**** publicly said that he admired an AG who protected the president from the law. He argued that AG Eric Holder protected Obama from prosecutions, which he saw as a good thing. At this point, AG Merrick Garland has chosen to not prosecute T**** for multiple instances of obstruction of justice, each instance being a separate felony (discussed here in 2019). The choice is up to Garland. Maybe Biden could order Garland to prosecute T****, but at this point that seems highly unlikely.

Both democracy and tyranny can share traits. Governments of both can be bigoted, corrupt and/or incompetent. Two major things distinguish them. One is reasonable compromise. Democrats have to compromise, but tyrants don’t. The other is the rule of law. In democracy, the law is above everyone. So at least in theory, even the elites and leaders are subject to the law. In an authoritarian state, the dictator or plutocrats are the law. They say what the laws is and they apply it equally or unequally when it suits them.

Arguably inherent in the law in a democracy compared to the law in an authoritarian state is a meaningfully higher level of objectivity. For dictators, the law tends to be what the dictator has the power to say it is. Nearly absolute power can inject nearly absolute subjectivity into laws if the dictator or plutocrat is so inclined.

Much as one might agree with the sentiment of the Texas DA, he arguably undermines the rule of law, which is arguably too weak already. Is it too subjective to give DAs that much discretion? In essence, broad discretion gives them power to ignore and abuse law in addition to tailoring justice to reasonably deal with unique situations or complexities. Some discretion is always bad. Sometimes it is good. It depends on how it is used. Regardless of good or bad intent, there can be a lot of subjectivity in how discretion is exercised.

It feels as if the law in America has become dangerously subjective. Radical right American authoritarians have come to understand and embrace how much the law can be bent or abused to undermine and subvert democracy. The more one considers this, the more one some will come to understand that subjectivity and discretion can be a powerful tool in the war against democracy and the rule of law.

Qs: Should the DA in Texas not prosecute anti-abortion law violations in his district? Should he prosecute, but try to minimize the penalties? Is at least some discretion necessary for law enforcement and/or judges because, as AG Levy wrote in 1949, “in an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible”?  

News bits: Sleazery in and out of court, whistleblower punishment, etc.

Lawyers spitting venom at each other

Department of Justice lawyers apparently finally ran out of patience with the sandbagging and lying that Trump’s sleazebag lawyers and propagandists routinely engage in. The DiJ has asked the judge to hold Trump’s sleazebag attorneys in contempt of court. That prompted this poison dart from one of the sleazebags:

The request came after months of mounting frustration from the Justice Department with Trump’s team — frustration that spiked in June after the former president’s lawyers provided assurances that a diligent search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. But the FBI amassed evidence suggesting — and later confirmed through a court-authorized search — that many more remained.  

Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes: mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president’s lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent.” He added: “This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Sleazebag Cheung should be jailed for (i) lying about being cooperative and transparent, and (ii) referring to a legitimate investigation as a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen. Unfortunately, given how sleazy the courts allow people to be, one can be pretty sure sleazer Cheung won't face any punishment for his current blast of lies. After all, he spewed that venom outside of court, and there's far more leeway for sleazery outside court than inside. Well, at least that's how is supposed to be.

Whack the whistleblower

The NYT writes:

It was a big deal that Reality Winner’s probation officer let her travel from Texas to her sister’s house in North Carolina over Thanksgiving. She is, after all, a traitor, in the eyes of the law.

Ms. Winner was arrested in 2017 for leaking to journalists a classified intelligence report on Russian hacks into U.S. election infrastructure and has been confined ever since — in a Georgia county jail, a federal prison, a halfway house and, most recently, in a probation so strict that she often feels strangled.

Still, Ms. Winner viewed the trip with the wariness of an underdog conditioned to expect any small kindnesses to turn against her.

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said flatly by phone. “I preferred not to go.”

Oh, and another thing, she said pointedly: She went during Thanksgiving but for her niece’s birthday.

“I hate Thanksgiving,” she said. “I hate the food. I hate the vibe.”

This side of Ms. Winner becomes familiar after a while: the cranky prison yard impulse to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t care and can’t be hurt. It poorly camouflages the battered idealist who, despite disillusionment and harsh punishment, appears bent on finding some way to make herself useful on a grand scale. She never had much money, education or connections, but in her own way, she has repeatedly tried to save the country — first as a military linguist guiding foreign drone attacks and later by warning the public that Donald Trump was lying about Russia.  

She still isn’t allowed to talk about her military service or the contents of her leak, leaving me to puzzle over why a young woman who still guards the secrets of the terrorism wars would risk everything to expose a five-page National Security Agency file on efforts to hack voter registration systems.

Ms. Winner mailed the report anonymously to The Intercept, where a reporter took the ill-advised step of giving a copy to the N.S.A. for verification. The authorities almost immediately zeroed in on her. She was charged under the Espionage Act, the same laws used to prosecute the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames and pretty much any other 20th-century spy you can name. The act has long been criticized for lumping together leaks motivated by public interest and, say, peddling nuclear secrets to a foreign government. Ms. Winner is considered a prime example of its downside.

She pleaded guilty and was given 63 months in prison, the longest federal sentence ever for the unauthorized release of materials to the media. (The former C.I.A. director David Petraeus got off with probation and a fine for sharing eight notebooks full of highly classified information with his biographer, who was also his mistress.)

There is just so much wrong with this. If Winner got 63 months in the slammer, why didn't Petraeus get 63 years? She was a low level person working to inform the American people of grievous lies by Trump, while Petraeus was a military general and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency working to make money for himself. She was selfless and altruistic, while he was selfish and sleazebag. Petraeus betrayed us, Winner did not. Again, these observations by Brooke Harrington about rich and powerful people rings absolutely true:

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

The whacked whistleblower

Electoral reform looks set to die in the Senate

The Hill writes:

Fizzling voting rights push angers Black lawmakers

The move by House Democratic leaders to fast-track a defense policy bill without tackling voting rights has ruffled some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who saw the must-pass Pentagon package as their last best chance to address election protections for several years to come.

The critics are grumbling that party leaders simply haven’t been aggressive enough in efforts to force the Senate to adopt the various voting rights bills passed by the House this Congress. Some are also suggesting that leadership has taken their support for granted.

“It seems like the Black caucus has always supported leadership in what it’s tried to do, but leadership of this caucus hasn’t returned the favor, always,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), a member of both the Black caucus and the liberal “squad.” He added, “And so now we’re in a precarious position where voting rights will continue to be under attack — state to state — will continue to be gutted.”

At issue was the fate of legislation — named after the civil rights icon and late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) — to restore those parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013. House Democrats had passed the bill this Congress, but it was blocked in the Senate, where GOP support is needed to overcome the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold.

In time, the Democrat’s failure to protect voting rights could easily turn out to be catastrophic. Maybe so catastrophic that America turns into a some form of a kleptocratic, White Christian theocratic dictatorship with permanent Republican Party rule. The Republican Party undeniably intends to neuter elections and non-Republican voters as much as they possibly can. Evidence of that intent includes (1) all the laws state Republican legislatures have passed since the 2020 elections, and  (2) the fact that the radical right Republican Supreme Court significantly nullified election protections in 2013. 

But who knows, maybe somehow the Senate will snatch this from the jaws of massive defeat and turn it into a win. But if that is going to happen, Schumer better get it done real soon. Time is almost out. Given vehement radical right Republican Party opposition to protecting elections and voter’s rights, things don’t look good for Team Democracy. Team Kleptocracy-Theocracy-Tyranny has got to be feeling pretty good about its prospects right now.

Law school time: Perjury vs. lying to the court

This 3 minute video shows a defendant had made false statements to the court in a defamation lawsuit. Alex Jones lied under oath in a deposition about what was on his cell phone. Jones falsely denied under oath that there was any content related to Sandy Hook on his phone. But no one could know that until his attorney accidentally sent the contents of his cell phone to the attorney hired to sue him for defamation about the Sandy Hook mass school shooting in 2012. Jones lied about the mass shooting many times in his radio broadcasts and in person in public. He finally got sued for defamation for his lies. Jones called Sandy Hook a deep state hoax. He falsely said that the murdered children were crisis actors and still alive.[1] 

In theory, lying to the court while under oath is a crime. In practice, lying or false statements to the court is almost completely ignored (maybe ~99.9999% of the time [~1 in a million]). When lying to the court is discovered, it is usually ignored because evidence standards are hard to meet. Liars always claim they didn't mean what they said or were unaware of what their words meant or didn't know that their statement was false or did not say what they said, or their lie didn't affect the outcome of a civil or criminal lawsuit.  

One source comments on perjury:

Perjury, or lying under oath in court, is often called “the forgotten offense” because it is not only widespread, but rarely prosecuted, especially in America, where it’s been a crime since 1790. According to an article from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, prosecutions for perjury have traditionally been rare, with only 335 criminal cases total from 1966 to 1970.

Most commentators attribute the absence of indictments and convictions for perjury to the highly technical nature of the offense. They point to problems in drafting indictments, in proving materiality of the alleged false testimony and in meeting the stringent evidentiary rules.

But a false statement by itself is not quite perjury—it has to affect the issue at hand, and people are usually not convicted for false statements that don’t influence the court.

That last highlighted bit is a potent shield that protects defendants from liability for lying under oath. The line between a false statement and the crime of perjury is often blurry. The shield in perjury ranks right up there with the power of plausible deniability to protect lawbreakers, especially white collar criminals accused of complex crimes. 

The broader significance for demagogues and elite criminals: 

Difficulty proving perjury + plausible deniability + presumption of innocence

= weak rule of law

The point of this post is not mostly about Jones. His situation exemplifies a far more important and broader point. Lying is common in politics, commerce, religion, society and just about everywhere else. It is very rarely a crime. Sophisticated liars know this. The rarity of penalties for lying constitutes a rationale for lying and feeling no moral qualm about it. 

That is why: 

• Our constantly lying, treasonous ex-president published a book where he proudly proclaimed that he employed “truthful hyperbole” in his business dealings. Because there is no punishment, a businessperson can easily believe that lies are just truthful hyperbole because they do not rise to the level of a punishable effect in a business deal. Lies are legal. Everything legal is sanctioned by society.
• In a recent conversation between Matt Gaetz and Roger Stone, these comments were recorded: “Well, you’re a bullshit artist, not a liar,” Gaetz said. “Correct,” Stone said. “There’s a big difference.”  

What is the difference between bullshit and lies? Usually little or none. But in the minds of Gaetz and Stone, there is a significant difference of some sort. For Gaetz and Stone, bullshit is OK, but lies are less OK to some unknowable degree for some reason(s) that is unclear to me. Maybe it mostly boils down to how people like Gaetz, Stone and the ex-president define lies to favor their own rotten agendas. 

In the case of the ex-president’s business dealings, one can begin to see how difficult it would be to prosecute for tax evasion. He overstates his net worth to get bank loans, but understates the value of his properties to minimize his taxes. It is a win-win for him. 

When one couples lies with plausible deniability and the legal presumption of innocence as tactics in politics or business, one can see how a sophisticated demagogue or a criminal can get away with a hell of a lot of illegal behavior. The courts are simply unable to reach most if it for lack of evidence.

In essence, the rule of law has come to be mostly a protective shield for elite demagogues and criminals, while being a sword for most everyone else. Maybe it always was that way. This points to a basis for sociologist Brooke Harrington’s observation about wealthy people and the law: 

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

Footnote: 

1. In addition to lying about his cell phone, Jones had also testified under oath that his business operations were being deplatformed and he was not getting much revenue. That was another lie. During some of the time he claimed poverty, his businesses were taking in over $800,000/day. When Jones lies, he lays out some real whoppers.