Ted Poe Quotes

Well, I - all cases to me have interest. Every case is important to somebody, the people litigating that case. But the most difficult case for me is the case where one person says a, the other person says b, and you just don't know for certain who is not telling you the truth.

You don't get John Gotti to testify against his driver. You get the driver to testify against John Gotti.

That justice should be administered between men, it is necessary that testimonies of fact be alleged; and that witnesses should apprehend themselves greatly obliged to discover the truth, according to their conscience, in dark and doubtful cases.

Plea bargaining is a system that is best described as one of condemnation without adjudication. It is a system that replaces trial, which is what our constitution intended, with deals… those deals are coerced. The prosecutor is basically forcing people to waive their rights to jury trial by threatening them with ever greater sanctions if they refuse to plead and instead demand the right to jury trial.

Every witness withholds information from the Congress.

There are a lot of weak people out there who will say almost anything they think a prosecutor wants them to say to save their skins.

When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth. Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens.

Prosecutors, unlike any other official in our system, … are not as accountable… to the public that they serve Police officers do what they do in a public space. Judges are in a courtroom... Prosecutors make their charging decisions and plea bargain decisions behind closed doors…. There is no transparency … There is a lot of unconscious and implicit bias.

The Saxon laws … decided almost all matters of any doubt amongst them by methods which, however inadequate, were extremely simple. They judged every controversy either by the conscience of the parties, or by the country’s opinion of it, or what they judged an appeal to Providence. They were unwilling to submit to the trouble of weighing contradictory testimonies; and they were destitute of those critical rules by which evidence is sifted, the true distinguished from the false, the certain from the uncertain.

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

O.J. Simpson never lied to me.

It is now clear that the president violated both his oath of office and the oath he took to tell the truth. In doing so, Bill Clinton not only committed perjury, he violated the public trust.

It only takes one lie to taint your entire testimony.

Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness- stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach and four.

It's been very interesting. We've seen a lot of interesting testimony. We've seen a lot of interesting people, a lot of allegations, a lot of lies, a lot of misinformation and some truth.

Prosecutors have absolutely no control over what witnesses say when they leave the grand jury room.

I will ensure that no criminal will ever get any political protection in my government. If anyone takes law in his hands, he would not be spared.

In the Justice Department, responsibility for overseeing and directing investigations is lodged in the department's prosecutors.

Attorneys general, district attorneys, and federal prosecutors have a responsibility to separate their politics from their law enforcement powers.

There are five requirements for an accused to turn state witness. One of the requirements is that the accused does not appear to be the most guilty.

If I utter one lie, I'll have to remember it the next time someone asks me about it. It's far simpler to state the truth.

During the Mueller investigation, Roger Stone lied to federal investigators and allegedly pressured one potential witness. Not good. Never good.

Trump simply can't dial down the lying, or turn it off - even, his own attorneys suggest, when false statements may be punished as crimes.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.