“People have a right” and “exercising that right looks suspicious and should be investigated” aren’t at all mutually incompatible. If 1) there’s espionage by a foreign power to support Trump in the last election, and 2) we know that a specific person affiliated with the Trump campaign (particularly a sitting politician who was later nominated for a senior administration position) had contacts with Russian officials, the right response is not “he’s just exercising his right to free association, nothing to see here”.
Again, I point to any other serious crime being investigated, in which people who have conversations that they have every right to have are investigated solely because of their connection to the perpetrators of the crime. I would not accept “I wouldn’t care” from the person whose job it is to investigate that crime, and neither would you.
Seems like we could easily whittle that list down by restricting it to people who were granted top positions in the Trump administration.
And he wasn’t some celebrity spokesperson or “just ‘somebody who endorsed Trump’”, he was a major policy advisor for the campaign who has since been appointed AG. That he was appointed is evidence of his status in the campaign and of the continuing relevance of his activities during the campaign.
This is all tangent. To return to the point: Sessions’ statement is facially false. It’s false for him to say “I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians”, because he did have communications with the Russians.
There are ways to read his false statement to avoid it being dishonest: if he didn’t recall, or if he didn’t consider the meeting to be “communication with the Russians” (which is reasonable with respect to his group meetings with Russians, as Claire McCaskill demonstrated), or if he thought Franken was asking about campaign-related communication. But none of those make his statement true, they make it innocent.
But it doesn’t take liberal malice to think that none of those are plausible. Contacts with the Russians have been talked about almost nonstop between his meeting and and his false statement, so it isn’t plausible that he didn’t recall; he had a 1-on-1 meeting with the Russian ambassador, which is hard to spin as not “communications with the Russians”, he’s literally the Russians’ representative in the US.
The only colorably plausible excuse is that Sessions misunderstood the question to be about discussing the campaign, and then answered the misunderstood question in a technically true way because he and Kislyak didn’t talk about the campaign. To me, that still seems dishonest, because saying something that’s technically true knowing that it will mislead the listener is effectively equivalent to a lie. If that’s really the best excuse Sessions has, I’m still curious what was said in the meeting and why he went out of his way to avoid mentioning it. But I also think that’s a silly way of interpreting the question, because a closed door meeting with the Russian ambassador seems like something Franken would be interested to know about, and to know how Sessions would handle as AG.
Do you really think that if Sessions had said, “Well there was that one closed-door meeting with the Russian ambassador, but you don’t care about that because we didn’t discuss the campaign”, Franken would have been like, “please stay on topic, Senator, we aren’t talking about your closed door meetings that weren’t about the campaign.” Obviously not. Obviously Franken cared about meetings exactly like the one Sessions had. If Sessions liberally interpreted the question for the purpose of avoiding disclosing that meeting, that’s just as good as a lie.
EDIT: spelling and grammar and certa.