The Democrats Hypocritical Attack of Jeff Sessions

Politicians of the Democratic Party are not letting up in their attacks on the Trump administration and the members of the administration Cabinet. Already, former Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn has been forced from his position as National Security Advisor after only 24 days in his role, and both Trump’s picks for the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Navy have been forced to withdraw themselves from consideration for those jobs due to conflicts of interest.

Other targets of intense partisan attacks include Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist and former Senator Jeff Sessions, who was confirmed as Trump’s new Attorney General.

Sessions in particular was the subject of brutal and unwarranted assaults on his character by liberals during the nomination confirmation process, as progressive groups signed petitions and spoke out against Sessions due to his supposed racism, which was based on claims made about an incident that occurred more than 30 years ago.

Like deceased Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, there’s no statute of limitations in parts of the public’s mind when it comes to social justice, it seems. Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1940s for several years but repudiated his membership and decried the organization as early as the 1950s.

For the next 50-odd years, Byrd had to keep apologizing for a youthful mistake and continue to denounce the group even though he had left it as long as half a century earlier.

That didn’t stop Republicans from making memes and pointing out “Exalted Cyclops of the KKK Robert Byrd” decades later, just as Democrats are doing the same with Sessions, despite the fact that the latter may have made a sarcastic joke about the KKK more than three decades ago. Democrats continue to swear he’s a “racist.”

Now, Sessions is being subjected to another witch hunt over supposed contacts with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, the same man that Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn had to resign for being in touch with prior to President Trump’s nomination.

House Democrats, led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Senators led by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York have signed a petition for Sessions to resign, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) sent out an email that read, “BREAKING: Jeff Sessions May Have Perjured Himself.”

This is in reference to Sessions’ confirmation testimony in the Senate, where he denied having any contact with any Russians as an advisor to the Trump campaign. According to the Washington Post, this was a lie because Sessions had apparently met with Ambassador Kislyak not once, but twice in 2016, and did not disclose this fact to the Senate in his answers to questioners such as Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota.

Specifically, the Post reprinted the transcript of the hearing where Senator Franken asked Sessions if he had communicated with the Russian government. Sessions answered Franken, “I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in [the Trump] campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

But what the Post did not do was provide the context of the question and answer, in which Sessions was being asked this question only as it related to the Trump campaign, whereas the Post made it seem like Sessions’ answer was all-encompassing and final.

Franken had asked about “a continuing exchange of information” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This was in light of the leak of the so-called “Dirty Dossier” on Trump that had been published by Buzzfeed and reported on CNN — before being discredited as a whole by the Trump administration and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

When Sessions met with Ambassador Kislyak, it was a brief meeting in his Senate office in Sessions’ capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee. A second brief contact was an informal one with at least 50 other ambassadors present at a Heritage Foundation event in July of 2016. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont asked Sessions in writing if he had “been in contact” with any member of the Russian government “about the 2016 election,” to which Sessions answered simply, “No.”

In its reporting on the story, the New York Times disclosed the fact that the Obama administration sought specifically over time to preserve evidence of any and all contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials, no matter how inconsequential they may have been.

This stands in marked contrast to the same administration’s attempts to hide evidence and emails associated with private servers, particularly as they related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This could well suggest that the Obama administration even engaged in proactive espionage against Russian officials.

Certainly, the shutting down of two Russian spy compounds in New York’s Long Island and in Centreville, Maryland by the Obama White House in December 2016 may have been part of a public relations effort to “blame the election loss on the Russians,” as certain Democrats were wont to do in the wake of Trump’s victory in November.

Reporters following the story have pressed House Minority Leader Pelosi on how Sessions’ contacts with Ambassador Kislyak differed from, say, the highly suspicious meeting of ex-President Bill Clinton with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix International Airport while Hillary Clinton was under investigation for her email server last year.

“[T]here couldn’t be a starker difference,” Pelosi answered. “Attorney General Lynch had a social encounter, serendipitous, some might say, that the former president of the United States came by to say hello and they discussed their grandchildren… This is a completely different thing. The reason we have been saying that the Attorney General Sessions should step aside and maybe should never have been confirmed is because he was a surrogate.” Pelosi continued to argue the point, saying the two situations were as different as “day and night.”

Senator Chuck Schumer said the Department of Justice — specifically Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente (an Obama appointee) — needs to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Sessions. This was two days after announcing that “I don’t see any place where [Democrats] can work with [President Trump].”

It needn’t be repeated that the Democrats in Congress also have a long history of weakness when cross-examining other guilty parties in front of them, such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, former CIA Director James Clapper and aforementioned ex-President Bill Clinton.

It also should be said that the standard for perjury is far higher than Sessions’ words, as perjury must be committed “knowingly” and “willfully.” By these standards, Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the Senate would qualify, even though Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe wrote that there were no issues with it.

For his part, Sessions held a press conference in which he stated, “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” and “no such things were discussed” during his two brief meetings with the Russian ambassador.

Sessions also reiterated that “my reply to the question of Senator Franken was honest and correct as I understood it at the time. I appreciate that some have taken the view that this was a false comment. That is not my intent. That is not correct. I will write the Judiciary Committee soon — today or tomorrow — to explain this testimony for the record.”

President Trump has weighed in on the matter, saying that he has “total” confidence in Jeff Sessions. Republicans such as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have said they don’t see the matter as serious; Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called it “political theater” and a “nothing burger.”

It should be noted that the Washington Post reported that Russia was not the only country whose ambassador Sessions met with. In total, as Senator, Sessions met with more than 25 ambassadors privately (20 in 2016 alone), but interestingly, the Post leaves out of their article that the day before meeting with Kislyak in his office, Sessions met the ambassador from Ukraine, Russia’s on-again, off-again enemy.

At his previously cited press conference, Sessions claimed that the Russian ambassador got “testy” when Sessions questioned him regarding Ukraine, saying that “Russia had done nothing wrong in any area, and everybody else was wrong.” Sessions also pointedly mentioned that he turned down the Russian ambassador’s cordial invitation to lunch at a future date.

The Post also left out of their article the fact that Sessions is not the only member of his Senate committee to meet with Kislyak. Democratic senators sitting on the committee such as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri also met with the ambassador (pictures of McCaskill’s meeting are Google-able) and seem to have no recollection of it, according to their Twitter feeds of both recently and years ago.

Despite this, the Democrats appear to have no problems with McCaskill or Manchin. This is on top of the fact that former President Obama and/or his aides met with Kislyak at least 22 times at the White House, according to official visitors’ logs. And all 100 members of the Senate — both Democratic and Republican — have had direct contact with Russian officials, up to and including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The author of the original Washington Post article on the matter, Philip Bump, said he believes the “Democrats are overplaying their hand” when questioned about the matter, especially if one looks at a timeline of Sessions’ actions.

And indeed, this story may be more about trying to put a “bounce” in the media’s positive reports about Donald Trump’s great State-of-the-Union address of a week ago than anything else. But the real concern is that if Democrats succeed in getting Sessions to resign just two weeks after Mike Flynn’s resignation, it may embolden them to seek out additional targets and at a later date perhaps even go after “The Big Man” himself.


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