Sessions Is Latest Victim In Expanding Russia Story
Well, the media’s swoon over the “new” Trump after his address to Congress didn’t go completely off the rails lasted about 24 hours. Then the news broke that Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador twice during the campaign and lied about that fact twice during his confirmation hearing.
The Washington Post reported last night that Sessions met with Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, twice during last year’s election campaign. Once was at his Senate office in September and the other occurred at an event at the Republican National Convention in July. While there may or may not have been anything untoward about those meetings, the fact is that Sessions lied in his answer to a question from Senator Al Franken about what Sessions would do as Attorney General if he found out that there were contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Sessions, in his answer, volunteered the following, “I have been called a surrogate a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians”. This was an outright lie. And the remarkable thing was that the lie was not even a direct response to Franken’s question but something Sessions offered on his own.
Now there may be nothing untoward about a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee meeting with the Russian ambassador but a survey of the other 26 members of the committee by the Post got a response from 20 of them and none of those 20 said they had met with the Russian ambassador. Said one staff member, “Members of the committee have not been beating a path to Kislyak’s door. There haven’t been a ton of members who are looking to meet with Kislyak for their committee duties.”
As usual with Washington scandals, it’s not the original sin that creates the problem, although in this case lying under oath to Congress is pretty bad. But that seems to have been de rigeur in order to join Trump’s cabinet. Steve Mnuchin, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, and Betsy DeVos all “misled” their confirmation committees. Lying to Congress seemed to be a badge that each nominee must get to prove their loyalty in order to join Trump’s cabinet. For Session, like Flynn, the real problem came in his initial denial of this story last night. His spokesman said, “There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer…He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.” That may be a legitimate answer to the meeting in September at the Senate but that surely doesn’t apply to the meeting at the Republican National Convention which is a purely political event. A Justice Department official also added, “There’s just not strong recollection of what was said” at the September meeting. I believe that was Flynn’s answer as well when his call to the very same Russian Ambassador was uncovered. But that statement turned out to be operative for only a few minutes when Session’s office put out another statement saying he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.” Yet another version was produced by an unnamed official in the Trump administration saying that there were “superficial comments about election-related news, not substance of their discussion”.
It beggars the imagination to think that you would have the Russian Ambassador meet with you in your private office in the Senate and then not remember what was discussed. So that quickly morphed into just saying that whatever as discussed did not involve the election campaign. Just like Flynn, the story changes to fit the facts that are known at the time.
Democrats are asking that Sessions resign but that will never happen. For Sessions himself, it would mean going from a ranking Senator to Attorney General to nobody in record time. But he will now be forced to recuse himself from the investigation going forward because right now Sessions is nominally in charge of essentially investigating himself. Even Republicans will not let that stand and this morning many GOP members are calling for Sessions to recuse himself. The bigger question is whether this will be the final straw that pushes this investigation out of the Congress and into an independent commission or prosecutor.
The Sessions-Russia connection is important because it is possible that it was Sessions who brought the shadowy Carter Page into Trump’s orbit as an adviser to the Trump campaign. Page was a guy who was billed as a Russian specialist but no one who ever worked in Russia had ever heard of him. You can read his whole backstory here but he looks exactly like someone Trump would glom onto because he is a fraudster in every sense. But the Trump campaign became remarkably sensitive about Page being a connection to Russia and disowned him last summer.
In addition, the reports of frequent contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia are becoming more widespread. The New York Times reports that British and Dutch intelligence services reported to their US counterparts that people associated with the Trump campaign had various meeting with Russian officials, come close to Putin, in a number of European cities during the election. In addition, US intelligence intercepted communication of Russian officials describing their contacts with associates of Trump and the campaign. The Time story also describes the Obama administration trying to distribute these findings as widely as possible within government in order to make it more difficult for the incoming Trump administration to cover it up.
The Russia story is the stench that will permanently surround the Trump presidency for the next couple of years. Trump may be able to spray some freshener every once in a while, but the stench, like the story, will always return.
Meanwhile, historians will look back on the 2016 election in amazement. Trump’s Russian connections were rumored throughout the campaign and the intelligence services were well aware of conversations between the Trump campaign and Russia. But James Comey focused his entire efforts at blowing the Hillary email issue beyond all proportion and the press followed right along. Comey’s actions are corrupt and illegal. But the inability of the press to expose and pursue Trump’s Russian connections, along with unwillingness to hold Trump and the GOP accountable in general, will go down as one of the great failures of modern American journalism.