Jeff Sessions Clams Up in Congress
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
How many ways are there to fail to answer a question under oath?
Ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The last time Mr. Sessions appeared before a Senate committee, during his confirmation hearing in January, he gave false testimony.
“I did not have communications with the Russians,” Mr. Sessions said in response to a question no one asked — and despite the fact that he had, in fact, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, at least twice during the 2016 presidential campaign. The omission raised questions not only about his honesty, but also about why he would not disclose those meetings in the first place.
On Tuesday Mr. Sessions returned to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s possible ties to those efforts.
That was the plan, anyway. In fact — and to the great consternation of the Democratic members of the committee, at least — Mr. Sessions was not on board. He arrived in full body armor, testy and sometimes raising his voice to defend what he called his honor against “scurrilous and false allegations” that he had colluded with Moscow.
He also defended his misstatements in January, to the Judiciary Committee, as being taken out of context, and he lowered a broad cone of silence around all his communications with President Trump regarding last month’s firing of James Comey as F.B.I. director, claiming it was “inappropriate” for him to discuss them. Did they involve classified information? No. Was he invoking executive privilege? No, he said, only the president may invoke that. Reminded that Mr. Trump has not done so, he said, “I’m protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses.
In lieu of a real excuse, he cited a longstanding policy at the Justice Department — although he couldn’t confirm that it existed in writing or that, if it did, he had actually read it. In other words, Mr. Sessions has no intention to answer any of those questions now or in the future.
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, angrily accused Mr. Sessions of “impeding this investigation” by refusing to respond, but perhaps the attorney general was wise to keep his mouth shut. When he opened it, he often seemed to contradict himself, his staff at the Justice Department, or the president.
The most glaring example was his claim that the letter he wrote supporting Mr. Comey’s dismissal was based on the former director’s missteps in the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server — even though Mr. Trump himself had almost immediately blown that cover, telling a national television audience that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he decided to fire Mr. Comey.
Mr. Sessions’s explanation would’ve been impossible to swallow anyway, since he, like Mr. Trump, had originally praised Mr. Comey’s actions in the Clinton investigation.
The attorney general also had a strange reaction to Mr. Comey’s plea that he not be left alone with the president again. By his own account, Mr. Sessions seemed less concerned with the president’s highly unusual and inappropriate behavior than he was with Mr. Comey, telling him “that the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice needed to be careful to follow department policies regarding appropriate contacts with the White House.”
So here are a few more questions that Mr. Sessions should answer, but probably won’t.
Why did he not resist when Mr. Trump asked him and others to leave the Oval Office so he could have a private conversation with Mr. Comey? At the very least, why did he not take steps to find out what had happened?
Why does he believe he did not violate the terms of his recusal by taking part in Mr. Comey’s firing? His recusal extended, in his own words, to “any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States” — which clearly includes the Clinton email investigation.
If his recusal was truly based, as he claimed, on his closeness to the Trump campaign, why not announce it immediately upon his confirmation, rather than wait weeks, until after news of his undisclosed meetings with Mr. Kislyak broke?
And perhaps most pressing: Why, since he agreed with the committee that Russian interference in the election represents a profoundly serious attack on American democracy, has Mr. Sessions never received or read any detailed briefing on that operation?
A version of this editorial appears in print on June 14, 2017
The Mortification of Jeff Sessions
Frank Bruni
The appearance of Jeff Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday didn’t bring us much closer to understanding what did or didn’t happen between Donald Trump and the Russians, or what the president has or hasn’t done to cover it up. Sessions batted away many questions. His answers to others were gauzy and useless.
But as I watched him, a flustered Gump in the headlights, I saw a broader story, a dark parable of bets misplaced and souls under siege. This is what happens when you draw too close to Trump.
You’re diminished at best, mortified at worst. You’ve either done work dirtier than you meant to or told fibs bigger than you ought to or been sullied by contact or been thrown to the wolves.
One day, you’re riding high on the myth of Trump as a transformative figure and reasoning that some tweaking of norms and maybe even breaking of rules are an inevitable part of the unconventional equation.
The next, you’re ensnared in his recklessness, at the mercy of his tempestuousness and quite possibly the butt of his rage: the case with Sessions, who sank low enough that he felt compelled last month to offer Trump his resignation.
“It’s just like through the looking glass: What is this?” Sessions said during his Senate testimony, and while he was alluding to the suggestion that he and the Russian ambassador had plotted together to steal a presidential election, he could just as easily have been referring to the warped topography of Trumplandia.
It’s a reputation-savaging place. Ask Rod Rosenstein for sure. Herbert McMaster, too. Also James Mattis. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Rex Tillerson. Dan Coats. All have been under pressure, undercut or contradicted. They’ve been asked to pledge their fidelity to — even proclaim their adoration for — a man who adores only himself.
My God, that video, the one of the cabinet in full session at long last. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the most chilling measure yet of Trump’s narcissism, and it’s a breathtaking glimpse into what that means for the people around him.
They don’t volunteer purplish flattery like that because it’s their wont. He wants it so badly that they cough it up. To buoy his ego, they debase themselves, and what you heard them doing in that meeting wasn’t just swallowing their pride but choking on it. They looked like hostages — hostages in need of the Heimlich.
Well, most of them. Mike Pence has discovered a freaky talent for such freakish sycophancy, and called it “the greatest privilege of my life” to assist “the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” (Which word is that?) He sounded like he believed it. The mysteries of faith, indeed.
A few others in the meeting summoned less ardor. “It’s an honor,” Mattis said, but then continued, “to represent the men and women of the Department of Defense.” Trump turned away just then, as if the absence of his name equaled the loss of his interest.
Mattis has suffered the humiliation of assuring allies of our commitment to NATO just before Trump, without warning him, sowed doubts about precisely that. McMaster, whose book “Dereliction of Duty” is expressly about talking truth to power, found himself at a lectern doing damage control for his damage-prone boss. He vouched that Trump’s divulgence of classified information to Russian officials at the White House was no big deal.
No one in Trump’s administration was forced into this service and its compromises. Some hungered for power, in whatever bastard package delivered it. At least a few, like Sessions, had poisoned reputations already.
But there were those with higher motives, too, and they find themselves in a White House governed by dread. Who’s next to be shamed? What tweet or tantrum awaits? They thought that they’d be bolstering a leader. They see now that they’re holding a grenade.
You could sense the stress of that in Sessions, who endorsed Trump before any other senator did, won the prize of attorney general but on Tuesday was the prosecuted, not the prosecutor.
At times he had a hurt, helpless air. He cried foul at the “secret innuendo being leaked out there about me.”
He called the suggestion that he’d conspired with Russia “an appalling and detestable lie.”
“I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against scurrilous and false allegations,” he declared. No, but he made it a hell of a lot harder the moment he took Trump’s hand.
For all Trump’s career and all his campaign, he played the part of Midas, claiming that everything he touched turned to gold. That was never true. This is: Almost everyone who touches him is tarnished, whether testifying or not.
Jeff Sessions Gives a Master Class in Dissembling
Andrew Rosenthal
Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
If the testimony on June 8 by the former F.B.I. director, James Comey, was a startling example of candor in Washington, the appearance on Tuesday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee was a master class in bamboozling, blustering and butt-covering.
Sessions said with outrage that any suggestion that he might have done anything wrong, especially colluding with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, was an “appalling and detestable lie.” That was a moment of clarity. But it came in his opening statement and was not repeated during the rest of the hearing.
Sessions said at the outset that he would “respond to questions as fully as the Lord enables me to do,” by which he apparently meant not very fully.
As soon as he got questions that made him uncomfortable, Sessions stopped citing the Almighty and instead relied on supposedly long-standing Department of Justice rules against talking about private communications in public.
He was happy to say, for example, that he and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, discussed firing Comey before they were confirmed. Sessions was willing to say that he and Rosenstein told Trump they were concerned about Comey’s performance (concerns he admitted he never shared with Comey). He said they were asked to put that in writing, resulting in the infamous memo by Rosenstein that suggested Comey should be shown the door because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
But he was not willing to talk about anything the president said to him or Rosenstein beyond that, because it would violate those rules about not talking about confidential discussions between high-ranking officials. That gave the hearing a rather surreal air at times.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Sessions if he knew Trump had already decided to fire Comey before he spoke to Sessions and Rosenstein about it in May, Sessions said: “I would say I believe it has been made public that the president asked us our opinion and it was given and he asked us to put that in writing. I don’t know how much more he said than that,” Sessions said. “But he talked about it.”
Actually, the whole world knows that Trump said, in a television interview, that he planned to fire Comey regardless of what Sessions and Rosenstein thought and that he did it because of the Russia investigation.
I’m willing to bet that Sessions studied those comments pretty carefully. But at the hearing all he would say, more than once, was that he would let Trump’s “words speak for themselves.”
Feinstein asked whether Trump had the Russia investigation in mind when he talked to Sessions and Rosenstein about firing Comey. “I’m not sure what was in his mind explicitly when we talked to him,” Sessions replied.
Well, Feinstein asked, did the Russia investigation come up in the discussion about Comey? “I’m not able to comment on that” because it was a private conversation, Sessions said.
At another point, Sessions acknowledged that he and other top officials left the Oval Office after an intelligence briefing with Trump on Feb. 4, leaving Comey alone with the president. But he would not say whether Trump asked them all to leave. “That is a communication in the White House that I would not comment on,” Sessions said.
Reminded that Comey testified that Sessions lingered in the Oval Office for a moment and seemed uncomfortable with leaving, Sessions said: “I do recall being one of the last ones to leave.” But he added: “I don’t know how that occurred.”
Sessions explained that he recused himself from the Russia investigation because Justice Department rules require that any official who was a senior adviser to a candidate in an election stay out of investigations related to that election. But when Senator Ron Wyden asked why he then signed a letter recommending that Comey be fired over the Clinton campaign email investigation, Sessions grew angry.
“It did not violate my recusal,” he shouted. “It did not violate my recusal.”
Sessions’s appearance on Tuesday cleared up almost nothing, but it did showcase his political skills. At the end of his opening statement, he said “this president wants to focus on the people of this country to ensure they are treated fairly and kept safe” and suggested that some people have “different agendas.” Then he launched into a tirade about opioid addiction and violent crime.
Reporters covering the late Nelson Rockefeller used to call that bomfog — when Rockefeller lost track of what he was saying or ran into trouble, he’d give the people a few minutes of “brotherhood of man, fatherhood of God.”
The sad thing is how often that works. JUNE 13, 2017
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