Did Ivanka Trump and Donald Jr. Commit Perjury? by David Corn July 1, 2021 
Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. cut the ribbon at the Trump International Hotel in Washington on October 26, 2016, with Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Eric Trump, and Tiffany Trump. Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca (Sipa via AP Images) [You’re receiving This Land as part of a 30-day free trial . . . and the clock is ticking! Sign up today for the full experience and never miss an issue. It’s just $5 a month, for behind-the-scenes news and insights you’re not getting anywhere else.]
A few days ago, I reported that documents filed in the Trump inauguration scandal case and material that I obtained separately show that Ivanka Trump did not testify accurately during a deposition in that case. The scoop went viral. My initial tweet about the story generated over 4.5 million impressions. The article was highlighted in Twitter’s news feature. “Ivanka Trump” trended on Twitter. So too did “she LIED.” In fact, one major response to the story on social media—in various forms—was this: why didn’t the headline and story declare that Ivanka had lied and committed perjury. As one tweep put it, “You spelled lied like hell wrong.” Another said, “Who writes these headlines? I’d go with ‘lied under oath.’” A bunch of folks griped that the piece was too polite and should have declared that she had perjured herself.
I know. It’s the Internet. No one is ever happy. But there are reasons to use language carefully when reporting on such a subject. Let me explain.
First, for those who don’t know, Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC, last year brought a lawsuit against Trump’s inauguration committee and the Trump Organization, alleging that they connived to enrich the Trump clan. Basically, the lawsuit asserts that the Trump Hotel charged the inauguration committee hundreds of thousands of dollars over the market rate for the use of its facilities during inauguration week, and the committee accepted these charges. (Everybody wins! Everybody in the Trump family, that is.) Racine also maintains that the committee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to host a private party for Trump’s adult children at the Trump Hotel on the night of the inauguration. Given that the committee was a nonprofit organization, using the tax-deductible donations it received in these ways would be highly improper. Racine is seeking to reclaim this money so it can be distributed to actual charitable activities. This civil case—a major act of alleged Trump grifting—has not received the media coverage it warrants.
Racine’s lawyers deposed both Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for this lawsuit. And as I’ve reported, Trump Jr., like his sister, gave apparently false testimony while under oath. Ivanka said she “really didn’t have an involvement” in inauguration planning, though documents indicate she did review inauguration plans, discussed hosting an event, and even had a say in approving menus for inauguration events. Trump Jr. said he didn’t know the lead producer of the inauguration (I found a video clip of him warmly praising her) and was not involved in fundraising for the inauguration (other testimony placed him at one or more meetings of the fundraising committee). He also conveniently forgot many matters.
Were they lying? That seems a good bet. But can we know what they were thinking at the time they spoke those words? And don’t forget the George Costanza defense: “Jerry, just remember. It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”
More important, was it perjury? That crime is notoriously hard to establish in court. You are allowed to make mistakes while testifying. You can get things wrong. You can slip up. You can fail to remember or misremember. You can even purposefully speak with imprecise and misleading language.
In 2017, Helen Klein Murillo, a student at Harvard Law School and an editor of the Harvard Law Review, wrote an instructive article in Lawfare about the challenges of charging Trumpers with crimes of lying, such as perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice. (Just months into the Trump administration, truth-telling was clearly a problem for Trump officials.) “Perjury is extremely difficult to prove,” she noted. “A prosecutor has to show not only that there was a material misstatement of fact, but also that it was done so willfully—that the person knew it was false when they said it. In Bronston v. United States, a unanimous Supreme Court held that a literally true but unresponsive answer could not form the basis of a perjury conviction even if the individual intended to mislead.”
Here’s the question that was asked in that case, a bankruptcy proceeding: “Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr. Bronston?” He said no. The follow-up: Have you ever? His reply: “The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich.” Bronston was being shifty. He once had a personal Swiss account, but he misled by not directly answering the question at hand and, instead, saying that his company did. The government brought a perjury case against him and won a conviction. But the Supreme Court tossed out the conviction, saying even an intentionally misleading statement was not necessarily grounds for a perjury conviction.
I’m not going to play defense counsel for the Trumps, but it’s not tough to imagine that if either Don Jr. or Ivanka faced a perjury charge, they would plead a memory lapse or argue that their statements were not exactly a lie. (“I thought the question was whether I had an official role in the planning. Sure, I unofficially provided advice when asked.”) And as a matter of journalism, it would be wrong (and perhaps legally risky) to state plainly that their seemingly false testimony amounted to perjury. (I don’t even have to consult with my lawyer to know this.) So in these articles, I avoided the p-word. The person best able to address the possibility of perjury would be Racine, and his office declined to comment on Ivanka’s testimony and its accuracy.
But this much is clear. Ivanka and Jr. each swore an oath to tell the truth and then made statements that were untrue. My stories provide enough material for a reader to reach a reasonable conclusion on whether these statements were lies. Though I do firmly believe in calling a lie a lie—I’m the guy who wrote the book The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception—I don’t think shouting “they lied” was necessary in these pieces (and their headlines) to serve the journalistic mission at hand. The facts tell the story. And I wonder whether they even care about being branded liars. Their father—who uttered at least 30,573 false or misleading claims as president—has certainly shown them that paying a price for lying is what other people do. 
What to Read, Watch, and Listen To The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America by Adam Serwer. Years ago, I hired a blogger from the American Prospect to come work for us at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. Yeah, I told him, you sure as hell know how to blog, but what about reporting and writing? Time for the next step up for you. It worked out well. Not only did Adam Serwer do great work for us; he moved on to eventually become one of the top-notch essayists and critics of the Trump era, writing from his perch at the Atlantic. Moreover, Serwer originated one of the most basic and insightful notions of the Trump years: “the cruelty is the point.” This summed it all up: the essence of Trumpism was division and derogation. Being cruel—to immigrants, people of color, women, and others—was no bug. It was a feature. The feature. Serwer captured this idea in a pithy phrase that has been much repeated. As an occasional pundit, I am jealous.
That compact observation is the fitting and obvious title for Serwer’s new book, a collection of his Trump-related essays that are accompanied by his own post-Trump commentary on those articles. In all these pieces, Serwer demonstrates his well-honed talent for casting the conflicts of today against the aching arc of US history. As he remarks in the book, “The ideological currents that swept Trump into the White House are not some aberration—they are essential forces of political conflict in American history that have been concealed by accidents of conservative sentimentality and liberal optimism.” The final piece in this collection illustrates that effectively, as Serwer compares the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to the 1898 racist coup that destroyed the thriving Black neighborhood in Wilmington, North Carolina, killed hundreds, and overthrew the government of that integrated city, in which Black men held political office. Writing about 1/6, Serwer notes, “It was a burlesque parody of Wilmington, an enraged rabble attempting to capture or kill federal lawmakers to force them to overturn an election in the name of democracy, a mob that had cheered police repression of Black Lives Matter protesters assaulting cops. Like much of the Trump era, the Capital riot was a lethal farce, spun out of the darkest forces in American history, by a man entirely indifferent to the consequences for anyone but himself.”
Read Serwer and you will feel—and be—smarter about the American present and its past.
A personal note: I am grateful for the shout-out in the book. As an editor, I endeavor to help my reporters become the best observers and journalists they can be. That often means dishing out homilies and time-worn pieces of advice that might seem quaint these days or, worse, irrelevant. But one of my efforts appears to have stuck with Serwer. He writes, “American journalism is afflicted by a presentism, a kind of goldfish memory that struggles to think outside the present or recent past. That makes a certain amount of sense—the old chestnut is that ‘news’ is what is ‘new’—but an old editor of mine, David Corn of Mother Jones, used to say that the news is also what people have forgotten. The reaction to Trump, whether enthusiasm or apprehension on the right or the disbelief on the left, showed that Americans had forgotten quite a bit, and I have spent the last five years trying to help people remember.” Adam, yes you have, and it’s been a public service of great importance.
Cézanne Drawing, the Museum of Modern Art. In the New York Times this week, art critic Jason Farago had a dazzling review of the impressive Cézanne Drawing exhibition that currently headlines the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He notes that this carefully constructed exhibit breaks Cézanne free of the father-of-modernism prison and allows MOMA-goers to reconnect with those Cézannian basics that paved the way to Picasso, Matisse, and others. As Farago writes, “For centuries before Cézanne, the greatest European art was the art that most accurately pictured the world, with precision, illusionism, elegance, sprezzatura. Cézanne junked all that. Instead, he used art to give form to the process of seeing that world, individually, with both eye and brain.” Farago explains the importance of Cézanne’s drawings for his ground-breaking paintings. And for my money, experiencing the artifacts of art-making—studies, preliminary sketches, and the like—is often more exhilarating than gazing at the finished product. So this exhibition was on-target for me.
One piece that particularly caught my eye was this watercolor: 
Here Cézanne is providing a 19th-century version of the latest Hollywood craze—a crime show. It’s a grisly scene of a man about to plunge a dagger into his victim at a real-life location: the picturesque coast of L’Estaque in southern France. The work was part of an 1895 exhibition of the artist’s drawings and paintings—“one of the few public presentations of his work during his lifetime,” according to a curator’s note at MOMA. A critic at the time cited “the intensity of the violence,” remarking that Cézanne “dares to be rough.” The rest of the MOMA show is far more peaceful. (Apples! Lots of apples!) But I wondered if the gallery-dwellers of his day found this roughness disturbing. And is there a path from this act of gruesome and visceral storytelling to Netflix’s too-many murder series? Thankfully, I was also drawn, as Farago was, to a gorgeous series of watercolors of rock faces in southern France. There was much more beauty than brutality on display. (You can see Cézanne’s drawings at MOMA through September 25.)
Got any feedback on the above or recommendations of what I should be reading, watching, or listening to? Send them to thisland@motherjones.com. Read Previous Issues of This Land June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.
June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.
June 26, 2021: Is Josh Hawley dumb or evil? (The answer is not both); Dumbassery that encourages mass “executions” in the United States; renowned guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson’s new tour and new book (and his claim regarding the best strings arrangement ever on a popular song); MoxieCam™ (before and after photos!), and more.
June 29, 2021: How the new UFO report is bad news for UFO believers; my own UFO tale; HBO Max’s Hacks; an anti-racist anthem; and more.
Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.
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