Ted Cruz says, "I don't know John Boehner, " and "He and I have never worked together."

By "don't know," Cruz does not mean never having met Boehner. Rather, as Cruz said to Meygan Kelly, "I've probably met him 2,3,4 times in my life. I'd be surprized if we said 50 words to each other. And everything we've ever said has been empty pleasantries like 'Good to see you, Mr. Speaker'."

Here Cruz is drawing a reasonable distinction between knowledge of a person that is infrequent and very casual in nature, and knowledge of a person that is beyond causal and not infrequent. A possible example of the deeper knowledge could be Boehner's (as he claims) being a golfing and "texting buddy" of Donald Trump. Most of us would agree that there are very differnent levels of knowing people -- such that one would not say of a person infrequently related to that you in fact "know" that person. This, clearly, is what Cruz is asserting. To meet does not equal to know.

To counter this, political opponents have noted that John Boehner claims that Cruz was once Boehner's lawyer. Cruz says, Boehner and I "have not worked together" and yet Boehner says: "Ted Cruz used to be my attorney." Boehner said this to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show in January 2014, according to the WPost.

According to some political observers, Boehner's assertion is supposed to help nail Cruz as a liar.

A couple of points here. I would suppose that very many of us have hired out lawyers for professional services. In certain circumstances we could therefore say truly: "I have met the said lawyer." And yet we could also say we do not really know the lawyer in any kind of depth. We could honestly say this about any number of other people we might have hired for professional services.

Secondly, the natural inference from hearing a statement like "Ted Cruz used to be my attorney" is that Boenher and Cruz worked together directly and therefore had direct knowledge of each other in this context.

It turns out however, that Cruz may not at all have been Boehner's attorney in this manner. Instead, Cruz is on record as being part of a legal team, in which younger Cruz was a "junior associate," and his "involvement ... didn’t extend beyond assisting with briefs and attending meetings with Boehner’s staff" -- that is, not with Boehner. This is according to a Cruz Campaign statement quoted in the Daily Mail.

According to the Cruz campaign, Cruz "doesn’t remember even meeting Boehner" when the Texas senator was supposedly the Speaker's lawyer. "Much less" does Cruz recall "ever having had a substantive conversation with him."

As I read and analyze the record, Cruz seems to have acquitted himself both honestly and well. If anyone might have left the wrong impression, that person may be John Boehner, whose statement, "Ted Cruz used to be my attorney" seems to rather overstate what in fact was the case.

For more from Ted Cruz on this, see this Press Conference video from Cruz in Indiana, uploaded on Youtube April 28 (he begins addressing specifically Boehner's comments at the 13:15 mark).