August 5, 1994 - Part 4
August 5, 1994 - Part 4
(14:10:17) That is why certain Senators would be here at some times and not at others. They'd have other responsibilities going on at precisely the same time. That's why sometimes the same question would get asked two, three, or four times over. Because one Senator would want the answer to a question that might have been asked earlier by another Senator, but because that Senator was out of the room at the time somebody asked the question, they didn't hear the question asked and they didn't hear the answer, so when they came back they would have to put the question themselves. A lot of it does seem repetitive, and I don't know any way to solve that problem. That's the nature of the situation. But the other side of it was this- When you have witnesses in where there are conflicts in what they're saying, and where there are direct contradictions, you have to examine people very carefully, You don't just examine them with cross-examination as witnesses, but you have to take documents, records, and other things that you can find that establish the truthfulness and completeness of what they're saying. That takes time, especially when you have conflicts. We have a lot of direct conflicts in the testimony here as to what the truth is and if people are being honest in the answers they're giving. It can take a long time to sort that out. And, sometimes, it's never completely sorted out. Finally, you just have to make a judgment at the end as to bow the weight of evidence comes out. I think, in some of these situations, we're going to have differences of opinion around the table as to what we think and how we assess it. It's no different than a jury. This is not a trial as such, it feels partly like it, but it's different in important ways that I won't get into, but it's the same in the sense that we have to make a judgment at the end as to what we believe. We try to do that collectively and we try to do it individually but it's 'very difficult and we're all tired. And, like anybody that works long hours and gets tired, that has an effect on how you think about things, it slows down, at least for me, my processing time a little bit. So, with respect to some of the things we've heard, I want to now weigh very carefully. In fact, I want to go back and read some of the cross-examination again. I want to read, again, what an individual witness said and then perhaps compare it, side by side, with what another witness said to try to make a final judgment as to why there was a difference, why there was a discrepancy, and if 797 somebody there was being less than truthful or less than complete in their answers. In that regard, without getting into specific individuals, but to illustrate the point, we bad one witness here one day who gave an answer to a question by Senator Sarbanes. And the answer to the question that was put by Senator Sarbanes was no, but what had happened was be bad conditioned his answer in such a way as to enable him to give a no answer to the question. Senator Sarbanes, very skillfully, could see what was going on. He took the person's answer and, one by one, asked him to remove the qualifying aspects that he had very skillfully put into his answer. It took Sen- ator Sarbanes about three slices to get the qualifiers out of there. Once he had done that, it turned the no into a yes on the very same question. Senator DAMATO. Mr. Chairman, if I might. The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Senator DAMATO. That was absolutely one of the most magnificent pieces of examination that I have ever seen. I just want to commend my colleague. You did it with such art. You sliced away all of the fat and got right to the core. The CHAIRMAN. It was a brilliant job. The bottom line was it was an illustration, if somebody was paying attention, of bow a witness can very skillfully, in my view, give a false answer to a question by the very clever juxtaposition of words. And Senator Sarbanes, who has a keen ear and an even keener mind, shaved that away and got the truthful answer. That doesn't excuse the answer that was given in the first instance. When that happens it shouldn't be lost on people in the Executive Branch of Government, not just in terms of the initiating facts that caused this case to come before us, but also with respect to testimony given by witnesses here. That's just my view. I'm not trying to speak for the Committee in saying that, but I have a very strong feeling about it. That's one of the things that we can't tolerate any longer, so I was very distressed. I thought we had to deal with some of that right in the course of these hearings. It takes a long time to strip away and get down, as close as we can, to what the true facts are so that we can put them there and make decisions.