You are assuming Al Franken has the intelligence and the knowledge base to figure out what is going on.

Most people do not have perfect memory, complete recall, or eidetic copying. Thus, for any number of reasons, there are gaps in their recall and the human brain organically regrows, reconnects, and reconfigures “gaps” in the brain’s neuron system. So what was just a blank “I don’t know” turns into “I know what I saw”. What they saw wasn’t what they knew, though.

Willful deception takes this to a different level, comparable to Good and Bad Think, where the brain regrows and deletes its own memories based upon internal guidelines. This is different from merely refusing to speak about something or controlling body language to prevent giving away internal thoughts. This is literally reconfiguring the brain’s own memories via internal thinking and habits.

The brain does this naturally in a human as they live life, people call it nostalgia. Psychotherapists like to study it as hypnosis and regressive therapy. The police like to talk about witness memory and the lawyers like to talk about coaching and cross examining.

Propagandists like to think of it as a kind of WMD or Weapon of Mass Deception. Far more useful and untraceable than those other WMDs people worry about.

Date rape drug side effects seem to be memory loss. High adrenaline or traumatic experiences may also provide temporary memory loss or “gaps”. Amnesia is also another form of short or long, complete or partial, memory reconfiguration.

Brainwashing consists of reconfiguring a person’s memories so that their allegiances shift. The emotion suffered from their enemies’ actions are projected or displaced upon a different target, such as the target’s former allies. They can’t remember what they don’t remember, after all. Used against women in the sex slave trade and empire, it produces loyalty, fear, or obedience. Used against hostages, people call it Stockholme Syndrome. Meaningless compartmentalization, really. It’s only a single thing being used, WMDs.

Also seen in psychotherapist human experiments where false memories of child rape were implanted and projected upon fathers and family members, by various working therapists on vulnerable and captive patients. Regressive memory therapy doesn’t just access the subconscious memory storage, it can alter it just as easily. So that the deception becomes the truth, and the truth becomes the lie, and the lie becomes the lawsuited reality of Law.