Pierce: How Many Lies Did You Count During Jeff Sessions' Testimony?

[mcar]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55625/jeff-sessions-testimony-falsehoods/


It was quite an afternoon for contempt of Congress on Tuesday. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III probably committed the crime of contempt of Congress, while the complete inability of the Senate Intelligence Committee to pursue the matter certainly aroused in me a contempt of Congress that I haven't felt in years. Honest to god, is there a shallower person in public life than Republican Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas? If he wasn't asking JeffBo about his taste in spy novels, he was lying, barefaced, about his taste in spy novels, he was lying, barefaced, about what went on in the Republican platform committee last summer regarding military aid to the Ukraine. And can we ever get John McCain to stop being cranky about younger senators, especially young female senators, doing their jobs?...

You just don't get to refuse to answer questions before a Senate committee because you don't want to, or because you think you might get the president* in Dutch, or because you don't like the people asking the questions. The Bartleby defense—"I would prefer not to…"—has no basis in constitutional or criminal law. There is no, as Senator Martin Heinrich put it to JeffBo, "appropriateness bucket" in which the attorney general can hide himself. Yet, there he was at the end of things, being flattered by the committee's chairman, Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, for the immense sacrifice JeffBo had made in coming in and being transparently ridiculous on camera for a couple of hours...

Everybody on that committee knew that, when JeffBo declined to answer questions about whether James Comey was fired because of the Russia probe, he was hiding the plain truth behind a privilege that he'd made up on the spot. Everybody on that committee knew that JeffBo's memory lapses were at best highly convenient. (He couldn't remember meeting the Russian ambassador, but he could quote an op-ed by William Barr from almost a year ago? That dog don't even want to hunt.) Everybody on that committee knew that you can't refuse to answer a question because the president* might want to invoke executive privilege at some vague point in the future. But if the majority is content to look like an entire bag of tools and pretend otherwise, there's not much the Senate can do about being obstructed in such a shameless fashion.

Actually, there is one historical precedent for what Sessions asserted that went unmentioned, and that precedent is not promising. Although even it wasn't as barefaced as it was on Tuesday, the assertion of an illegitimate, unasserted "executive privilege" was, for a long time, central to the defense of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's corrupt AG who went to jail behind his crimes relating to Watergate and what Mitchell himself called, "the White House horrors." It is an argument you make when you know that there is an unacceptable political price to be paid if the president* actually does assert executive privilege in advance—which is what the Obama administration did on several occasions, despite Tom Cotton's having been deliberately and dishonestly obtuse on the comparison during Tuesday's hearings.

[sheshe2]

1. It might be easier to count the truths he told..

because that would be zero.

Thanks for your post, mcar.

[mcar]

3. Too true

[gordianot]

6. He may have told one truth even that is suspect.

When he says he has not been briefed into Russian election hacking. That too is probably a lie with his horrible memory questionable.

[justiceischeap]

2. I don't recall... nt

[mcar]

4. Sad but LOL

[smirkymonkey]

5. What a travesty!

I can't believe what a joke this "testimony" was. It disgusts me that he was allowed to get away with it.

[Hekate]

7. KnR

[Honeycombe8]

8. I don't think you can be in contempt when you VOLUNTEERED to testify.

He wasn't subpoenaed. He OFFERED, asked, to testify. Under that situation, I would think he could answer whatever he chose to. He was oath-bound to tell the truth, though, in the things he DID state.

I could be wrong, though.

[Kleveland]

9. A song for the lot of them!

[L. Coyote]

10. We got Sessions on record under oath proving he is an incompetent AG.

Now the Dems need to send him a lot of letters requesting follow-ups and documents.