He did not have sex with that ambassador
Well great. Brilliant. The new US Attorney General lied at his confirmation hearing. Just what we need: a lying corrupt racist Attorney General, working for the most authoritarian and corrupt administration we’ve ever had.
Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.
That should be it. Fire him. Never mind recusing himself, he should be gone.
One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.
The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.
He should be gone.
At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
Is that scummy enough? It certainly seems scummy enough to me.
In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.
Sessions responded with one word: “No.”
Sessions is saying wull he didn’t talk to Kislyak about the election, so he told the truth.
When asked to comment on Sessions’s contacts with Kislyak, Franken said in a statement to The Post on Wednesday: “If it’s true that Attorney General Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.”
Senators have to be polite. I don’t.
Several Democratic members of the House on Wednesday night called on Sessions to resign from his post.
“After lying under oath to Congress about his own communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement, adding that “Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country.”
He never was. The racism is a major disqualifier before we even get to the lying to Congress.
What do you mean? His racism may have been the main reason he was selected; it fits the pattern of other selections. So how can it be a disqualifier? Oh, wait, you mean it may disqualify him overall, even if the President loves him for it?
This entire administration is beginning to make the Nixon administration look like amateurs at corruption.
Wapo in the breach again. It’s been over 40 years, but they are so welcome.
Throttle Deep!
Would lying to Congress be equivalent to perjury?
If lying under oath or equivalent? Yes, I would say so. But then again I’m not the Attorney General.
Yes. I’m not a lawyer OR the Attorney General but I know from news items over the decades that lying under oath to Congress can get you jail time.
It was central during the HUAC hearings, for instance. If you pled the Fifth then you’d be blacklisted, and if you didn’t plead the Fifth, they could compel you to answer their questions about other people. This was a hideous dilemma for a lot of people grilled by the Committee.
Ironically, the first hit I got on Google for “lying to Congress” was this news article back when Republicans cared about such things.
Anyway, I knew about section 1001; I was under the impression that there might have been a specific statute for lying to Congress, but apparently not.
On the other hand, as the Post said in a bit I didn’t quote, perjury is very hard to prove, because it’s impossible to know what’s inside anyone’s head. From that CNBC piece:
It’s very very hard to know what people believe to be true.
Yes, certainly concerning people like Trump et al. But Sessions is after all a scolar of jura (not the epoch) and really should be expected to understand what is supposed to be true, legally. Still, my opinion only.
So perhaps Sessions believes he didn’t talk to Russia? It seems unlikely.
At least with Clinton, he had gotten them to parse the meaning of “is” and “sex” to the extent that he might legitimately (though implausibly) state that he didn’t have sex with Lewinsky. In fact, with his machinations on the topic, it appears she had sex with him, but he didn’t have sex with her, by a twisting of the language.
Sessions might parse the meaning of “talk” down to that extent, I suppose. I mean, if you run into someone and say “Hi, how ya doin'”, technically that would be talking to them. But that’s not what this is about. You would have to be seriously deep into dementia to not have realized you dialed a phone, spoke to the person on the other end, and hung up again. (My mother could do that in the later years of her life, after her stroke). But, if he has dementia of that magnitude, then he has no business being in his position.
OB @ 8, yes that’s why Spicer has already launched the ‘his statement was inadvertently misleading’ defence. Everybody knows that’s a crock of shit, but how to prove it? Either way he should resign. Either he’s an incompetent fool, too spineless to own his mistake and poor judgement, or he’s a corrupt liar who possibly engaged in treason (who would know).
If he’s forgotten that he spoke to the Russians, then he didn’t lie.
But if that’s the case, then he has a condition that so compromises his cognitive function that he’s incapable of doing the job. Either way, he needs to be gone.
Ditto Steve @ 12. This wasn’t some underling that he spoke to, it was the Russian *ambassador*, and they spoke twice, with one of those times being a private session in his office. If he’s forgotten this, then something is wrong with his brain to a degree that he should not be in a leadership position.
Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, not espionage—the statue of limitations had long passed on the latter. Of all the Russian agents questioned in the 40s, he was unique in lying rather than invoking the 5th.
The McCarthy vaudeville act had almost nothing to do with actual Communist subversion. The real threat had been inthe 20s-30s, and the bitter truth is that Stalin was a bigger threat to leftists than he was to the Establishment.