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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

> 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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