Behold this brilliant act of journalism by Mehdi Hasan in a recent interview with Erik Prince.
During this segment, Prince admits to being in a meeting in Trump Tower in August, 2016, which he says was about "Iran policy." Hasan presses him on why he didn't tell Congress this, reminding him of his own testimony.
With a straight face, Prince replied, “I don’t believe I was asked that question."
To which Hasan whips out the transcript and reads his own words back. Watch the rest to see Prince flounder before he finally surrenders.
Hasan observes:
Prince, I discovered, seems to have a Trumpian relationship with the truth. He tried to suggest that a car bomb exploded at Baghdad’s Nisour Square “five minutes” before Blackwater guards shot and killed 14 innocent Iraqis on September 16, 2007. I reminded him that there was no such explosion at Nisour Square. He denied that his current company, Frontier Services Group, is planning to build a “training facility” in Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uighur Muslims are being held in Chinese detention camps, dismissing a press release confirming the news as a mistranslation from Mandarin. I had to inform him that the press release was issued by his own company, FSG, in English.
[...]
This is a major problem for this major ally of the president. It is, of course, a crime to lie under oath; it is also a crime to lie to a congressional committee, whether you are under oath or not. “Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell,” Vox notes, “was convicted of lying to a Senate committee during the Watergate scandal.”
So I couldn’t help but ask the defensive Prince: Did he not worry that Mueller might send him to prison for not telling the truth, as he did with Gen. Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and others?
“Nope,” he replied, giving me that dead-eyed stare once again, “not at all.”
He should worry.
