5 Trump Appointees Accused Of Lying To Senate Under Oath

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is facing calls for his resignation and a criminal investigation into possible perjury after it was revealed that his testimony before the Senate incorrectly indicated that he had not communicated with Russia during the presidential campaign. But Sessions is not the only Trump appointee facing such allegations.

Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Steve Mnuchin and Tom Price all stand accused of misleading the Senate while testifying at their confirmation hearings under oath. However, actual charges of perjury are very hard to prove, and very few people have historically been convicted of intentionally lying to the Senate.

Nevertheless, these accusations bog down the nascent Cabinet. Here's what you need to know about the allegations:

1. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price

Price told the Senate that the shares in the biomedical firm Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd., a biomedical company in which he invested at a discount, "were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time." But the Wall Street Journal spoke with the company, which said that the discounted stocks were only available to fewer than 20 Americans at the time. Price now leads the department in charge of regulating the health care industry.

2. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos

The Intercept accused DeVos of lying to the Senate about her position on a board of her mother's foundation that donated to Focus on the Family, which the Southern Poverty law Center calls an anti-LGBTQ hate group. When senators pointed out that she had been listed by the foundation as a vice president and a board member, she denied any association with the foundation. DeVos called her inclusion on the relevant documents a "clerical error."

Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept argued, "The idea that her own mother’s foundation would accidentally list her as a vice president for years as result of a clerical error is just not believable."

3. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt

When Pruitt was Oklahoma's attorney general, he used a private email account for state business, FOX 25 has reported. This in itself would not necessarily be a huge problem for Pruitt, except that it conflicts with his testimony to the Senate.

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, asked the EPA nominee, "Have you ever conducted business using your personal email accounts, nonofficial Oklahoma attorney general email accounts, text messages, instant messenger, voicemails, or any other medium?"

“I use only my official [Office of the Attorney General] email address and government-issued phone to conduct official business,” he said.

4. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin

The Columbus Dispatch reported that despite Mnuchin's claims that his former bank OneWest didn't conduct "robo-signings," a controversial practice that can speed up foreclosures, evidence suggests that it did in fact engage in the practice. Bill Faith, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, told the Dispatch, "The guy is just lying. There's no other way to say it."

5. Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Sessions' misleading Senate testimony may be the most famous at this point, as it ties in to another scandal that has dogged the current administration: Trump campaign connections to Russia.

During his Senate testimony, Sessions said, "I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians."

But it was revealed Wednesday night, and confirmed by Sessions himself, that the then-senator met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in July and September of 2016. He has recused himself from any investigations related to the campaign, but has defended his statement to the Senate saying it was "honest and correct as I understood it at the time."

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