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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

> Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do

I just want to point out that "testified in-front of Congress" seems to have no relation to the truth of any statement. I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress.

Zuckerberg also testified that shadow profiles don't exist and that users can always remove their personal information from Facebook (they do exist, and you can't). James Clapper testified that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" surveil hundreds of millions of Americans (they do, very "wittingly").

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Testifying in Congress absolutely carries legal ramifications. It's just pretty hard to pin it so I agree with the "difficult" sentiment.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/is-zuckerberg-under-oath-c...

John M Poindexter was one who was convicted of lying to Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter#U.S._executive...

I agree that it is technically illegal, but if the most recent example of a conviction (that you can think of) was almost 30 years ago that tells you that it's effectively unenforced.

Michael Cohen was sentenced for exactly this [1] just a few months ago.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/12/13/michael-c...

Yet James Clapper somehow got away with it. As do a lot of other people who have the same "political opinions" as Zuck.

Didn't that also involve lying to federal investigators?

Does it? One conviction in 30 years is also consistent with the conclusion that not that many people get invited to give evidence to Congress, and the people that do tell the truth (or at least don't tell provable lies).

Definitely illegal, not just technical.

> I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress.

It's one of the reasons Cohen is in prison, isn't it?

He lied to the FBI after a plea bargain which involved him telling them the truth. From memory, this all happened before his Congress testimony but it's definitely not related.

It is illegal to lie to Congress (unrelated to whether you're under oath or not), but I can think of very few examples where there were real ramifications for it.

> He lied to the FBI after a plea bargain which involved him telling them the truth.

Sure you're not thinking of Manafort? I don't think Cohen had a plea deal, and I don't think he was charged with lying to the FBI. Manafort and Flynn did, and Manafort I think was the one that then broke the deal. There's a lot of crimes to keep track of.

I guess it depends on what you mean by real ramifications as it's being served concurrently but Cohen is serving two months for lying to Congress, a charge he plead guilty to.

Yep, that looks right from his Wikipedia article. One count of making false statements to a congressional committee. It’s not immediately obvious to me when he was charged/convicted of that though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cohen_(lawyer)

Cohen pleaded guilty to several charges [1], including some that alleged that he lied in a written statement sent to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on 28 August 2017, and then repeated those lies in his testimony to the Senate committee on 25 October 2017.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/file/1115596/download

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