Yahoo Exec Didn't 'Lie' To Congress… Was Just Uninformed

from the that's-my-story-and-I'm-sticking-to-it... dept

A couple weeks back, Congress asked Yahoo’s general counsel Michael Callahan to stop by and chat about his earlier testimony, noting that he’d told Congress that Yahoo had no information on how China was able to track down and jail journalist Shi Tao even though documents released this summer showed that Yahoo actually was involved. Yahoo’s response to Congress was that the implication was “grossly unfair and mischaracterizes the nature and intent of our past testimony.” Of course, that didn’t explain the two factual bits of information: (1) Callahan said Yahoo had no idea what happened (2) documents showed otherwise. Given the two weeks to figure out how that mischaracterized the nature and intent of the testimony the best Callahan could come up with is to plead ignorance. He’s now apologizing and saying he was ill-informed when he last appeared before Congress. That could be true, but in his new statement, Callahan admits that he realized he had misinformed Congress a few months after his original appearance, and chose not to inform them (which he regrets). However, if that’s the case, why did it take him two weeks to say that publicly after first lashing out at Congress for pointing out his clearly incorrect earlier statements?

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Companies: yahoo

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Comments on “Yahoo Exec Didn't 'Lie' To Congress… Was Just Uninformed”

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7 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

So I guess that this just points out that if you need to go before congress then go uninformed.

There’s no benefit in actually being knowledgeable of what you’re testifying about, in fact it’s more likely to cause problems. Pretty much sounds like all of politics, the uninformed leading, the knowledgeable quiet, the rest lying.

Max Powers at http://ConsumerFight.com (user link) says:

It worked for me.

I told the IRS I was “uninformed” about paying taxes on gambling winnings from an Indian Casino. It worked for me (got away with it) although I was warned if it happens again, they would not buy that excuse ever again.

As an average citizen, I didn’t care what the IRS thought of me. As the CEO of Yahoo, he should worry about Congress and his reputation which has just been moved down some notches.

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