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Summary
Summary
Bestselling author James B. Stewart's newsbreaking investigation of our era's most high-profile perjurers, revealing the alarming extent of this national epidemic.
Our system of justice rests on a simple proposition: that witnesses will raise their hands and tell the truth. In Tangled Webs , James B. Stewart reveals in vivid detail the consequences of the perjury epidemic that has swept our country, undermining the very foundation of our courts.
With many prosecutors, investigators, and participants speaking for the first time, Tangled Webs goes behind the scene of the trials of media and homemaking entrepreneur Martha Stewart; top White House political adviser Lewis "Scooter" Libby; home-run king Barry Bonds; and Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff.
The saga of Martha Stewart's conviction captured the nation, but until now no one has answered the most basic question: Why would Stewart risk prison, put her entire empire in jeopardy, and lie repeatedly to government investigators to save a few hundred thousand dollars in stock gains? Moreover, how exactly was the notoriously meticulous Stewart brought down?
Drawing on the accounts of then-deputy attorney general James Comey and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, Stewart sheds new light on the Libby investigation, making clear how far into the White House the Valerie Plame CIA scandal extended, and why Libby took the fall.
In San Francisco, Giants home-run king Barry Bonds faces trial due to his testimony before a grand jury investigating the use of illegal steroids in sports. Bonds was warned explicitly that the only crime he faced was perjury. Stewart unlocks the story behind the mounting evidence that he nonetheless lied under oath.
Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme is infamous, but less well known is how he eluded detection for so long in the face of repeated investigations. Of the four he is the only one who has admitted to lying.
The perjury outbreak is symptomatic of a broader breakdown of ethics in American life. It isn't just the judicial system that relies on an honor code: Academia, business, medicine, and government all depend on it. Tangled Webs explores the age-old tensions between greed and justice, self-interest and public interest, loyalty and duty. At a time when Americans seem hungry for moral leadership and clarity, Tangled Webs reaffirms the importance of truth.
Author Notes
James B. Stewart lives in New York.
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
Anything but the Truth James B. Stewart warns of the risks of a perjury epidemic that has 'infected nearly every aspect of society.' TANGLED WEBS How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff. By James B. Stewart. 473 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95. JAMES B. STEWART dedicates his new book "to all who seek the truth." But in his view, the ranks of committed truth-seekers are shrinking before our eyes. "Mounting evidence suggests that the broad public commitment to telling the truth under oath has been breaking down, eroding over recent decades, a trend that has been accelerating in recent years," he declares. "Perjury has infected nearly every aspect of society." What is Stewart's "mounting evidence" that perjury is on the rise and "false statements are undermining America"? He concedes that "it's impossible to know for certain" whether lying is "worse now than in previous decades," but he emphasizes that "prosecutors have told me repeatedly that a surge of concerted, deliberate lying" by white-collar criminals "threatens to swamp the legal system." There is simply too much lying, he laments, and "too little is prosecuted to generate any meaningful statistics," in contrast to other serious crimes, like murder. "We know how many murders are committed each year - 1,318,398 in 2009," he writes in the first sentence of "Tangled Webs." At this point, if I were caught up in Stewart's prosecutorial spirit, I might object that the first sentence of his book is a lie. In fact, according to the F.B.I.'s statistics, an estimated 1,318,398 violent crimes, not murders, were committed in the United States in 2009. And a vast majority of these violent crimes didn't involve murder; they involved robbery and aggravated assault. But of course, it would be hyperbolic and unfair of me to accuse Stewart of lying without knowing more about the motive behind his false statement. Perhaps it was an inadvertent error, in which case calling it a lie seems much too strong. On the other hand, perhaps it was a deliberate misrepresentation devised to create a more dramatic opening - perhaps, in other words, he felt that comparing lying to robbery would be less vivid than comparing lying to murder. Deliberate misrepresentation seems highly unlikely for a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of his caliber, but without knowing more about his motives, I can't make a fair-minded judgment about how seriously to treat his false statement. Unlike Stewart, the Anglo-American legal system has long been sensitive to these fine distinctions. It has treated some lies more seriously than others, depending on the intent of the speaker and the effect on other people. It's true, as Stewart notes, that perjury was dealt with severely in 16th-century England. ("The offender was typically punished by cutting out his tongue " he observes wistfully.) But he doesn't note that English and American courts were so concerned about the human instinct to tell self-protective lies that they avoided putting defendants in situations in which they might be tempted to commit perjury. Until the late 19th century, American courts never examined defendants under oath, considering it a form of moral torture to force people to choose among self-incrimination, contempt of court and perjury, along with the eternal damnation they believed was the real punishment for betraying an oath to God. Although Stewart, now a business columnist for The New York Times, claims that lying has been on the rise, a more plausible thesis is that prosecutions for false statements have been rising - not because of growing contempt for the truth but because defendants are increasingly prosecuted for doing nothing more than denying their guilt to investigators. (These are the kinds of lies that courts used to excuse under a doctrine called the exculpatory no.) It wasn't until the postWatergate era that prosecutors began routinely to indict people not merely for lying under oath but for lying to federal officials even when not under oath - using a novel law that is the basis for several of the prosecutions Stewart celebrates. The book is constructed around four ripped-from-the-headlines case studies, involving "recent cases of perjury by people at the pinnacle of their fields": Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Barry Bonds and Bernard Madoff. But the Stewart and Libby prosecutions are hardly typical examples of good prosecutors triumphing over wicked, lying defendants, as the author suggests. Instead, both were widely criticized as perjury traps - that is, cases in which prosecutors can't prove any underlying crime and instead charge defendants with lying to investigators. Martha Stewart was never indicted for the crime for which she was originally investigated - insider trading - because prosecutors couldn't be confident that her decision to sell shares in a drug company after her broker told her the chief executive was selling his shares met the legal definition of insider trading as it's commonly understood in criminal law. (Stewart knew the executive was selling, but not why.) SIMILARLY, Scooter Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was never indicted for the crime for which he was originally investigated: possibly violating the federal Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he revealed the name of Valerie Piarne, a C.I.A. operative, in an alleged attempt to undermine the credibility of her husband, Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration. James Comey, the deputy attorney general (and the same prosecufor who had decided not to charge Martha Stewart with insider trading), concluded that it would be extremely difficult to prove that Libby knew Piarne was a covert agent when he mentioned her name to reporters. Instead, Libby was convicted of falsely stating that he had learned Plame's name from Tim Russert of NBC rather than from Cheney. Libby's motives for lying were obvious - like Martha Stewart, he wanted to protect his reputation - but it's hardly obvious that Stewart's or Libby's lies threatened to "undermine America" in any sense. James Stewart argues that "when lying is prosecuted only selectively . . . injustice results." But what injustice would have resulted if Libby and Martha Stewart had not been indicted? They could not easily have been charged with the crimes of which they were first suspected, even if they had told the truth. The collateral damage of the Libby leak investigation - including jail time for Judith Miller, then a reporter at The Times, who wanted to protect a source - arguably involved greater injustice than the self-protective lie for which Libby was prosecuted. And the lie that actually undermined America - George W. Bush's false claim that British intelligence had discovered efforts by Saddam Hussein to buy uranium in Africa - went unpunished. Stewart's other case studies also yield lessons more complicated than he suggests. For example, the elaborate lies that propped up Bernard Madoff 's Ponzi scheme wreaked havoc with the lives of thousands of innocent investors. But Madoff was successfully prosecuted not just for false statements but for massive securities fraud, and his Ponzi scheme wasn't discovered earlier because Securities and Exchange Commission investigators "never took the necessary and basic steps to determine if Madoff was misrepresenting his trading," as the inspector general of the S.E.C. found. In Madoff's case, unlike those of Libby, Martha Stewart and also Bill Clinton, the problem wasn't the cover-up; it was the crime. If you ignore the tendentious framework of this book - with its populist fulminations about how entitled celebrities may be even "more likely to lie and take risks than average people" - there is much to learn. Stewart has a prosecutor's ability to reconstruct dizzyingly complicated stories about who said what to whom and to organize them as intelligible narratives. But what emerges from these narratives isn't black-and-white platitudes about how stopping perjury requires a sense of "moral outrage," as Stewart concludes. Instead, we learn about the vast range of motives that lead people to lie: from unreciprocated loyalty, to a desire to court favor with celebrities, to embarrassment, pride and fear. A nuanced legal system - and a nuanced book - would take account of these human frailties and recognize that not all lies are created equal. Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xiii |
Part 1 Martha Stewart | |
1 ôCan I Go Now?ö | p. 3 |
2 ôEveryone Is Telling the Same Storyö | p. 45 |
3 ôA Conspiracy of Duncesö | p. 85 |
Part 2 I. Lewis ôScooterö Libby | |
4 ôThis Is Hush-Hushö | p. 123 |
5 ôAll the Reporters Know Itö | p. 154 |
6 ôDouble Super Secret Backgroundö | p. 203 |
7 ôA Cloud over the White Houseö | p. 220 |
Part 3 Barry Lamar Bonds | |
8 ôI'm Keeping My Moneyö | p. 265 |
9 ôEverybody Is Doing Itö | p. 303 |
10 ôYou're a Snitchö | p. 331 |
Part 4 Bernard L. Madoff | |
11 ôKeep Your Eyes on the Prizeö | p. 363 |
12 ôSome People Feel the Marketö | p. 392 |
Conclusion | p. 433 |
Acknowledgments | p. 443 |
Notes and Sources | p. 445 |
Index | p. 455 |