It’s almost as if the Attorney General is supposed to be especially punctilious about not breaking laws.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an ethics complaint against Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his testimony to a Senate committee that he had no communications with the Russian government.

The complaint, filed with the Alabama State Bar’s disciplinary commission, comes less than two weeks after The Washington Post revealed that Sessions met with Russia’s ambassador to the United States twice last year and did not disclose those communications when asked during his confirmation hearing in January.

Well you see he didn’t know they meant that kind of communications with the Russian government. He thought they meant the other kind. He didn’t think it worth the trouble to give a full answer and let the senators decide whether chatting with the ambassador was or was not what they were asking about. He thought it would be better to decide they didn’t mean that, and so say nothing at all about it.

Chris Anders, deputy director of the ACLU’s legislative office in Washington, claims that Sessions had violated Alabama’s rules of professional conduct preventing lawyers from engaging in “conduct involving dishonest, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,’” according to the complaint, which cites The Post’s story.

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The complaint, filed Thursday, says the report of the meetings with the Russian ambassador “does not square” with Sessions’s sworn testimony in the Senate.

Yes but he explained all that – he thought the Russian ambassador was not one of the Russians they were asking about. He really thought that; it wasn’t a lame excuse at all.

Following The Post’s article, Sessions acknowledged briefly speaking with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July and again at his Senate office in September. But he said there were no discussions about the Trump campaign.

And everyone should totally take his word on that. He’s an honest guy. We know that from how high and far out to the side he holds his hand up when he’s being sworn in.

Anders said Sessions’s communications with the Russian ambassador during the presidential campaign raises two concerns.

“One is that it’s highly corrosive of a democracy to have a future AG make false statements to the Senate related to a matter that’s under investigation,” he said. “And then, as part of that, the underlying matter of whether a foreign government illegally influenced the U.S. election goes to the very heart of our democracy and the sanctity of the election process. You can’t have a functioning legitimate democracy if foreign governments are influencing the outcome.”

Ok, you can’t have a functioning legitimate democracy, but you can have a functioning nightmare.