According to Title 18, Section 1621 of the US Code, anyone who “in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true” has committed perjury.

On July 18 of 2003, 12 days after Joe Wilson accused the Bush administration in a New York Times op-ed article of twisting intelligence and four days after columnist Bob Novak blew the cover of Wilson’s wife, CIA proliferation operative Valerie Plame, then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton was interviewed by the State Department’s inspector general in connection with an investigation into how the incident Wilson wrote about, the bogus intelligence on an alleged attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger, developed.

But he doesn’t remember it. When Bolton submitted his Senate Foreign Relations Committee Disclosure Form to the committee in advance of hearings on his nomination to the post of US ambassador to the UN, he answered “No” to this question: “Have you been interviewed or asked to supply any information in connection with any administrative (including an inspector general), Congressional or grand jury investigation within the past 5 years, except routine Congressional testimony? If so, provide details.”

The 35 Senators who wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging her not to support a recess appointment of Bolton — something that now appears certain — describe the disclosure form as “a document so important that it requires a sworn affidavit.”

Even if the affidavit Bolton signed is one of the documents covered under the perjury statute, establishing perjury would require an investigation into whether or not Bolton’s claim that he didn’t recall his time with the inspector general is credible. There won’t be any investigation because the only people who could inaugurate it are in the White House or in the Senate majority, and they don’t investigate their own.

And even if perjury were established, the White House has made clear that lying, whether under oath or just casually — the jury is quite literally out on which description best matches Karl Rove’s protestations about his role in the Plame affair — isn’t necessarily a bar to employment in the administration at least until the employee has been convicted of a crime and perhaps not even then.

So for at least the next year, our ambassador to the UN will be a man who is either suffering from severe memory loss or a liar (and possibly a perjurer), or both, not to mention a most undiplomatic diplomat, a determined advocate for tailoring intelligence to policy goals and, as former State Department official Carl Ford once memorably described him, a “kick down-kiss up” kind of guy.

Winning hearts and minds …

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