Jaworski didn’t buy it
Richard Painter explains why Jeff Sessions should be fired.
He points out that we’ve been here before:
In 1972 Richard G. Kleindienst, the acting attorney general, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a confirmation hearing on his nomination by President Richard Nixon to be attorney general. He was to replace Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who had resigned to run Nixon’s re-election campaign (and who would later be sent to prison in the Watergate scandal).
Several Democratic senators were concerned about rumors of White House interference in a Justice Department antitrust suit against International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, a campaign contributor to the Republican National Committee. They asked Kleindienst several times if he had ever spoken with anyone at the White House about the I.T.T. case. He said he had not.
That wasn’t true. Later, after Kleindienst was confirmed as attorney general, the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, and his team uncovered an Oval Office tape recording of a phone call in which Nixon told Kleindiesnt to drop the I.T.T. case. Kleindienst claimed that he thought the senators’ questions were limited to a particular period, not the entire time during which the case was pending.
Jaworski didn’t buy it. He filed criminal charges against Kleindienst, who had earlier resigned as attorney general. Eventually Kleindienst pleaded guilty to failure to provide accurate information to Congress, a misdemeanor, for conduct that many observers believed amounted to perjury. He was also reprimanded by the Arizona State Bar.
Sessions is attempting a similar sort of dance.
Once again, we see an attorney general trying to explain away misleading testimony in his own confirmation hearing. A spokeswoman for Mr. Sessions says that “there was absolutely nothing misleading” about his answer because he did not communicate with the ambassador in his capacity as a Trump campaign surrogate. His contacts with the Russian ambassador, he claims, were made in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
That may or may not have been the case (individual senators ordinarily do not discuss committee business with ambassadors of other countries, particularly our adversaries). Regardless, Mr. Sessions did not truthfully and completely testify. If he had intended to say that his contacts with the Russians had been in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and not for the Trump campaign, he could have said that. He then would have been open to the very relevant line of questioning about what those contacts were, and why he was unilaterally talking with the ambassador of a country that was a longstanding adversary of the United States.
He did not reveal the communications at all, however. He did so knowing that Senator Franken was asking about communications with the Russians by anyone working for the Trump campaign, including people who, like Mr. Sessions, had other jobs while they volunteered for the Trump campaign. Mr. Sessions’s answer was at best a failure to provide accurate information to Congress, the same conduct that cost Attorney General Kleindienst his job.
And, further weakening his explanation, he’s a lawyer. It seems pretty feeble for a lawyer to claim confusion about the question. Lawyers are trained not to be confused about such things.
And this time, unlike in 1972, the attorney general’s misleading testimony involves communications not with the president of the United States, but with a rival nuclear superpower. In 1972, any federal employee who provided such inaccurate information under oath about communications with the Russians would have been fired and had his or her security clearances revoked immediately, and probably also would have been criminally prosecuted.
The Cold War may be over, but Russia in the past few years has once again sought to destabilize the democratic process not only in the United States, but also in much of Europe.
Russia is not an ally. Putin’s Russia is an enemy as well as a rival. Putin’s Russia is an enemy without the figleaf of socialism.
Sessions should be fired and prosecuted.
The phrase “worse than the Nixon White House” is truly frightening.
All true, though I would quibble about the “figleaf of socialism” bit, as if its deliberate impoverishment of its citizens was somehow a mark in the USSR’s favour…
But that interpretation is entirely compatible with the figleaf metaphor: what they called socialism was actually a clusterfuck of famines and show trials.
Leon Jawarski’s son has an excellent essay on Watergate and his fathers exemplary and powerful leadership, when he held the nation together as Nixon’s lawlessness and perfidy was exposed. You can find it in his book on leadership called Synchronicity: the Inner Path of Leadership, Part one, Chapter one.
He writes, that at a key juncture Haig urged his father to take the job. “The situation in this country is almost revolutionary. Things are about to come apart. The only hope of stabilizing the situation if for the President to be able to announce that someone in whom the country has confidence has agreed to serve.” Leon Jawarski agreed to serve after he asked for and received the ability to proceed in complete independence. P. 18.
If you remember Alexander Haig’s posturing of “I’m in charge here” in the White House after Reagan was shot, despite the Vice President being next in line, this is an extraordinary moment when you see a former general recognizing the nation needed a man of stature, integrity, and trust, someone the public would have faith in. Haig also realized that no one in the GOP had that independence or devotion to the national good.