https://www.justsecurity.org/51399/cover-lie-russia-trump-campaign-conspiracy-perjury-suborn/
"The Trump team long engaged in a concerted effort to lie about campaign contacts with Russians during the 2016 election. Of this all reasonable observers know. Even some Trump supporters bemoan such a strategy ever took place, but it happened. The term for it is a cover up. Senior Trump campaign officials did not just lie to the media and the public. They also lied to federal authorities or risked doing so. At least they were “chancing a very high risk for a perjury situation,” as White House counsel John Dean put it to President Richard Nixon in plotting the Watergate cover up. The list of associates who apparently took this path includes, in chronological order: Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, K. T. McFarland, and Donald Trump Jr. That list is just based on current public information, and may grow. (I’m also excluding from the list Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who have been indicted for lying to federal authorities about their connections with Kremlin-linked Ukrainian parties). If you closely examine the record, the puzzle is whether the decision of so many of Trump campaign officials to chance a very high risk of perjury in covering up Russian contacts involved a tacit or explicit understanding on their parts to do so, and encouragement by the others—potentially including encouragement by the president himself. In a piece in the New York Times on Thursday, I put together the pieces of the puzzle, based on what we can infer from the circumstances and conduct of the relevant actors. Some points here to accompany that analysis: First, it is not just a crime to lie to federal authorities, but also a crime to encourage others to do so. The technical term is “suborning perjury.” If such actions involved a conspiracy, it would likely strengthen prosecutors’ tactical advantages."
