Just another 45 liar....the AG, this time

at his nomination hearing, Al Franken asked Jeff Sessions,
if he had any contact with Russia in the fall and Sessions said, no sir,
I did not… and low and behold today, we find out that sessions did
in fact have contact with the Russian ambassador last fall… even though
less then two months later, he denied it in front of congress while under oath
he lied to congress while under oath about contacting a foreign government…
he should be fired or at the very least investigated but noooooooooooooo,
the GOP have already said, ummm, a senator said that Republican don’t
investigate other Republicans… because for the GOP, party over country…
just the way Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Mussolini like it… party over country…

remember that… for the GOP, party over country…and liars get
rewarded in the GOP…
of course the defenders of the GOP will bring up somebody or other to defend
lying in front of congress under oath… but hay, remember party over country
is the GOP motto…

Kropotkin

in a press conference, Sessions just said he would “recuse” himself
from any investigation into 45 and Russian interference… but
that does not go far enough… to be fair and honest, we must
have a special prosecutor look into the matter… it is not enough
to have the second in command in the DOJ look into it…
to have faith in the government, the government must be
above reproach…or the American will lose faith in
the government… which is of course what the GOP wants…
part of the deconstruction of America as outline by Bannon…

Kropotkin

You could at least get the quotes right instead of making them up. If you actually quote what was asked and what was answered, it’s obvious he didn’t lie.

cnn.com/2017/03/02/politics/ … index.html

We know that what Sessions said here is false. He met with Russian officials on multiple occasions, at least one of which was a one-on-one meeting. Session’s has said 1) he met as a senator and not as part of the campaign, and 2) he doesn’t recall the meeting. Response #1 makes sense as a response to another exchange during the hearing:

There, fine, meetings may not have been “about the 2016 election”. But that isn’t what Franken asked, and “I…did not have communications with the Russians” is not nearly so narrow or equivocal.

He’s not lying given #2, but #2 doesn’t seem plausible given the amount of discussion around Russian contacts with Trump’s campaign. It’s possible, and I’m sure in his capacity as senator, Sessions met with a lot of people. But a one-on-one meeting with the Russian ambassador still seems significant, and like it would stand out in memory to Sessions (or someone on his staff who would have prompted him to correct the record in the event of an innocent mistake).

Not impossible that he isn’t lying, but it’s unlikely, and I don’t think the Trump administration has earned the benefit of the doubt on this issue.

Very conspicuous witch-hunt.
… shamefully so.

LET me make it as simple as I can: If Franken was truly meaning to ask, “What would you do if you heard anybody affiliated with the Trump campaign had spoken with any Russian official in any capacity over the past year and a half”, then the correct answer for Jeff Sessions to give would be “Nothing at all, obviously; private citizens can meet with whomever they like, and Senators often meet with foreign diplomats over the course of their work”.

If Sessions would have answered that way, every single human being paying attention knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Franken would have immediately clarified by saying, “I mean met with them to discuss the campaign”. Then Sessions would have responded in the exact way he responded in real life: That he was associated with the campaign and hadn’t heard of anything like that going on, and certainly didn’t do it himself. And that would be that.

And that’s really all you need to know. Everybody here knows Franken was asking about people meeting to discuss the campaign, everybody knows that’s the question Sessions was answering, it all comes down to how much you want to pretend to be retarded in order to smear a Trump supporter.

Not exactly. As it stands, he was lying under oath, and the fact that he didn’t see this coming, even as an intended trap, reaffirms the confusion in the White House; either they are ignorant or, they are malicious. Neither scenario befits a Presidency so early on in its tenure.

This thing can go either way, some top level effort to prevent a snow balling avalanche, or some tinkering that it will just go away. Another frightful possibility is an unexpected and may be manufactured case of national emergency, maybe a war.

Either that, or a repeat performance of looking for a
red herring, literally, mixed with what He knew,
should have known, etc.

The red scare redux.

Uccs, I think you’re being too generous. You’re reading “I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians [on the topic of the campaign]”, but that isn’t called for. The context of the answer is there: the concern is what happened during the campaign, not with respect to the campaign, and Franken is expressly concerned with “a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

So no, I don’t think it’s an agreed fact that Franken was interested only in discussions of the campaign. Surely he’d be interested in discussions of future Trump administration policies, policy issues on which Trump might take a position and the Russian preferences for those positions, any number of things that aren’t “the campaign” but that are problematic when we’re they’re discussed with a foreign power criminally meddling in an election on behalf of Sessions’ boss.

And this is somewhat tangential, but I don’t think the right answer, if the question were, “What would you do if you heard anybody affiliated with the Trump campaign had spoken with any Russian official in any capacity over the past year and a half”, would be “Nothing at all…”. Private citizens can talk on the phone with whoever they like, but you can bet that in the wake of the Pulse shooting, anyone that talked to Omar Mateen on the phone for any reason would be looked into. We have evidence that the Russians committed cybercrimes with the intention of interfering in the election to help Trump, so someone on the Trump campaign who spoke to Russian officials for any reason should be investigated as part of investigating that election interference.

Well, see above. If Franken was actually concerned with any and all communications between Russian diplomats and any and all Trump ‘surrogates’ about any and all subjects, then he was asking a preposterously dense and useless question, and the proper answer to it would be just what I described: Sessions should have said “People can talk to whomever they like, it’s a free country, and politicians regularly have to talk to diplomats to do their jobs.”

If that’s really what Fraken was curious about, then that’s really the best answer.

Sessions wasn’t answering that question, he was answering something like “What would you do if you found out Trump surrogates were discussing/strategizing their campaign with the Russian Government as is alleged in these documents I just brought up”.

So you just have to decide if Franken was asking a stupid, meaningless question, or if he was asking the good question that Sessions answered.

Well yeah, it’s not agreed upon now, because the left has a nothingburger the media will spin their way to continue this 'Russian ties" nonsense. That’s why I didn’t just ask people if they agreed, because liberals lie. I proposed a thought experiment. If Al Franken was really asking about any and all contact, then you have to accept “I wouldn’t care, because that’s completely normal/accepted behavior” as an answer from Sessions.

Which we all know nobody would accept.

Because Franken wasn’t asking about any and all contact.

Maybe, but none of those make Sessions’ answer dishonest either. Only “Franken wanted to know about any and all contact with Russia regardless of context” makes Sessions’ answer dishonest, and every reasonable person knows thats not what Franken was asking.

You’re talking about 30 senators and around 150 members of the house that endorsed Trump at some point in the campaign, along with who knows how many diplomats, who all have jobs that involve speaking to foreign officials about one thing or another, and you’re talking about a span of time covering a year and a half. You’re also talking about scores of celebrities, college professors, businessmen, current and former military commanders, and on and on and on. Remember, at the time Sessions spoke to Russian diplomats, he was just ‘somebody who endorsed Trump’. If that’s your definition of ‘somebody on the Trump campaign’, you just advocated for an investigation into thousands and thousands of people who’s careers or personal lives put them into a position to regularly talk with foreign leaders or diplomats.

Because you don’t like Trump.

“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.

Of course it is, because the real world isn’t narrated by a Democrat to make it sound scary. The real world is just the real world. In the real world, the ‘espionage’ you’re talking about is a private citizen’s email account being hacked because he set the password to ‘password’, and the contents of the email publicly leaked. In the real world, the “contact with Russian officials” was done as a part of a person’s job that requires them to speak to ‘officials’ from other countries on a daily or weekly basis.

Again, if Franken was seriously asking about anybody who supported Trump speaking with anybody from Russia for any purpose over the past year and a half, then Al Franken is a fucking moron. It’s obvious he was asking about the campaign, and no matter how much Chuck Schumer wants to pretend it’s not obvious, that’s still enough to mean this isn’t perjury or lying under oath or anything of the sort. It is reasonable for Sessions to think Franken was asking about the campaign, and that reasonability is sufficient. There’s nothing here other than the DNC’s hatred of Trump and desire to see any supporter of his go down. That’s it.

But it’s not about that crime, remember? If the question was about that crime (influencing the campaign), as Franken’s lead in to the question makes clear, Sessions answer is accurate. Sessions didn’t speak to anybody from Russia is his capacity as a surrogate, and neither did anybody as far as he’s aware.

Well yeah, that would be the most efficient way to keep Trump allies names in the headlines for the next four years, which is what this is actually about.

Which should, combined with his decision to recuse himself, be the end of the matter, since that means there’s nothing for him to resign over and nothing to investigate. But of course it won’t be the end of it, because discovering the reality of what’s going on was never the point.

It certainly does. You can imagine that none of them are true, but to think that none of them are even plausible does in fact require liberal malice.

The question was discussing the campaign. Specifically what Sessions would do as AG if evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia came to light.

The problem with that theory is that Sessions wasn’t even asked about his communications with the Russians. He ventured it. No crafty interpretation of the question was required to artfully avoid revealing that he had spoken to the Russians, because Franken didn’t ask him, even tangentially, about his own communications with Russia. He asked him what he would do, in his capacity as AG, if evidence came to light about Russian involvement in the Trump campaign. He didn’t go ‘out of his way to avoid mentioning it’. If he wanted to go out of his way to avoid mentioning something, he could have left himself out of it altogether and simply answered Franken’s question. People don’t bring up topics just to lie about them.

And yet he didn’t ask. There is only one question, and it doesn’t require any interpretation: Al Franken asked Sessions what he would do as AG if evidence about collusion came to light. Sessions bringing up that he wasn’t a part of any such collusion was ventured info.

  1. This is a crime. The victim may have had options for other things he could have done to prevent the crime (his password clearly wasn’t “password”, because Google doesn’t let you have “password” as your password), but it remains a crime.
  2. To describe this as the hacking of a “private citizen” is needlessly obtuse. It’s like describing the Watergate break-in as targeting a non-profit. Podesta was targeted for his political role.
  3. It is a crime perpetrated by a foreign government with the intent of affecting the outcome of the election. If Russia were only colluding with the Trump campaign to take out full page ads in the New York Times, that would still be significant and worth talking about. In the real world, when a foreign power criminally intervenes in an election, it’s newsworthy, it’s worth investigating.

To the rest your post, let me ask, because I feel like we’re talking past each other a bit: what does a discussion “in the course of [the] campaign” look like to you? Sessions is a senior policy advisor on the Trump campaign, he’s in line for a spot in the administration, what’s the minimum content of the conversation that makes it fit to what Franken is asking about? To me, that’s a pretty broad set of topics. Many of the topics that could be discussed in Sessions role on the Armed Services Committee would overlap with his role as Trump’s policy advisor, and a meeting on those topics should be disclosed as a “communication with the Russians” in the “course of the campaign”.

It apparently wasn’t worth investigating when Ted Kennedy did it to stop the evil Ronald Reagan. But I digress, it has been investigated. How many more authorities do you need to tell you that there is zero evidence of a link between the Trump campaign and the Russian hacking? You’re approaching this like it’s already been proven, and the truth is closer to the opposite. If you want an explanation for the Russian hacks, compare the timeline of those to Hillary’s first announcements of her intentions to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria and shoot down Russian planes.

Well, it would look a little something like this:

idioms.thefreedictionary.com/dur … +course+of

“During the course of your employment in the company, were you ever aware or suspicious of any illicit financial activity going on?”

If one were to answer, “Why yes. The AG scandal, Bernie Madoff, Wells Fargo creating all those fake accounts, and the Clinton Foundation were all in the news quite regularly during the course of my employment”, then one would have rather missed the point. In a question like that, it’s obviously being asked if you were aware of illicit financial activity at the company. It’s hard to think of an example of ‘in the course of X’ meaning ‘during the time period X occured, whether or not it pertained to X’.

Well, zero (or more like infinity, I guess), because Franken didn’t ask Sessions about his communications with Russia. He asked him what he would do, as AG, if ties between Russia and the Trump campaign were uncovered. Like I said last post, what Sessions said about his own communications with Russia was ventured information, not an answer to any specific question.

Maybe they should have been disclosed, but Franken didn’t ask. If only Franken would have actually asked, “Can you provide me with a list of every instance where you’ve spoken with Russian officials in your capacity as Senator over the past couple years”, we’d be in a completely different situation. Instead, Franken was obsessed with the ‘Trump Dossier’ that had come out, and already been debunked. Franken was fishing for an assurance that Sessions would go after Trump if those investigations bore fruit.

Carleas:
3) It is a crime perpetrated by a foreign government with the intent of affecting the outcome of the election. If Russia were only colluding with the Trump campaign to take out full page ads in the New York Times, that would still be significant and worth talking about. In the real world, when a foreign power criminally intervenes in an election, it’s newsworthy, it’s worth investigating.
[/quote]
U: It apparently wasn’t worth investigating when Ted Kennedy did it to stop the evil Ronald Reagan. But I digress, it has been investigated. How many more authorities do you need to tell you that there is zero evidence of a link between the Trump campaign and the Russian hacking? You’re approaching this like it’s already been proven, and the truth is closer to the opposite. If you want an explanation for the Russian hacks, compare the timeline of those to Hillary’s first announcements of her intentions to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria and shoot down Russian planes.

K: it has been investigated by whom and which authorities? 45 or sessions or Putin? there is plenty
of evidence of Russian collusion via hacking and other methods… look at who has been fired
or quit because of such meetings with the Russians, Manfort and Flynn…and as far as your
charge against ted kennedy about Raygun? really, you had to go over 30 years ago to find
some distraction against the current charges?

K: you are just ignoring the dnc hacks done by the Russians, as supported by the
FBI and the many meetings by 45 officials, by sessions, by manfort, by Flynn, by
45 son… the only way your argument works is by simply ignoring all the prior evidence
which as a conservative is your MO anyway… but look at the evidence and you can
make no other choice but to investigate… besides, if 45 is innocent, what can
he be afraid of… he can only be afraid if he is actually guilty of the charges…
so, man up and allow the investigation and if he is actually innocent, he will
be proven to be innocent and all this goes away… until he is investigate,
he will remain under suspicion…

Kropotkin

Ucc, are you sure that you’re views of these kinds of things are skewed by your political bias? You seem to be a lot more charitable toward Sessions that I think you would be if a “libtard” was in the same position.

This is a straw version of the accusation, though. Sessions didn’t stop being a senior advisor to the Trump campaign just before the meeting and resume that role at the end. He was an advisor throughout, he could comment on potential policies that would be adopted by a Trump administration and shape his own policy recommendations based on what the Russian ambassador told him.

This doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the accusations against Sessions. Whether or not he volunteered it, it matters whether or not it’s true. It’s fair to put the statement, “I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians,” in the context of the question to determine the intended meaning, but in the context of that question, it is still a false statement under oath if the content of the meeting with the Russian ambassador touched on the Trump campaign, right?

And I’d say any topic on which Sessions was advising the Trump campaign, touches on the Trump campaign, which is to say, it’s the kind of meeting Franken was interested in.

It’s not enough to do half an investigation and then declare, “It’s been investigated”. Every step of the investigation has revealed new damning details. We should keep investigating.

I’m not familiar with this reference, but I don’t have any problem condemning Ted Kennedy if he colluded with the Russians to influence an election. Ted Kennedy also killed a girl. Lots of liberals have done bad things, none of which change what Trump and his campaign did, or whether or not it’s wrong.

And tangentially, similar to a question I asked you in another thread: are you defending what Kennedy did here? If they’re equivalent, they’re either both right or both wrong. I’m going with both wrong.

Peter, I disagree with your comment that ignoring prior evidence is the conservative MO. I see plenty of evidence-ignoring from both major political tribes, and I’ve known honest dealers who ascribe to both.