With Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal of himself from involvement in any investigations into the presidential campaign — clearly in response to news first broken by the Washington Post that he met not once but twice with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the 2016 presidential campaign, thus revealing himself to have lied under oath during his confirmation hearings — we are left with as many questions as ever, and no certainty that there will be a high-level investigation to answer them. But putting aside the big issues for now — what was the extent of Russian intervention in the election, and to what extent, if any, was there collaboration between the Russians and the Trump campaign?, being the two biggest — I've got some smaller ones I want answered.
First, why did Sessions lie under oath? Even if you were to accept the Republican pushback that Sessions didn't lie so much as incompletely answer the questions he was asked, he has to have realized that were this information to come out later, it would seriously bite him in his Alabama ass. It is curious to me that in his answer to Al Franken that is the crux of his dissembling, he seems to actually volunteer the fact that he has been "called" a surrogate for the Trump campaign (funny phrasing, because this was a role he clearly and openly played); I am not going to call this the oversharing of a guilty conscience, but today it sure does act as a handy reminder of his closeness to the Trump campaign in nearly the same breath that he fails to mention his contact with the Russians.
More to the point — why would he think that news of his meetings with the Russians would NOT come out at some point, in this leaky Trump imperium? Since the meetings weren't secret, the safe assumption would have been that at least the fact of them would enter the public record. Just at the level of pure optics, it seems like he deferred a problem that has now exploded when it might do maximal damage to himself. Like National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, he has lied in a situation where there was a high probability of being found out (Flynn would have known that his conversations with the Russian ambassador were being monitored by the FBI, which by my reckoning makes his folly even greater than Sessions').
Which leads to my next question — and OK, this is a big one — why have two high-level Trump administration officials been caught in lies about their contact with the Russians, when the question haunting this presidency is whether Trump is president because of Russian assistance? As keeps happening in this story, they are acting like people with something to hide. Actually, we can state this even more strongly: they actively are hiding the extent of their contact with the Russians, which can only raise a reasonable person's suspicions. As outlandish as it once seemed, the novelistic idea of Russian interference is a known fact at this point. The really important question is whether Trump's people, and Trump himself, cultivated that interference.
Another question — why has Jeff Sessions recused himself now? Isn't this tantamount to being caught out in a lie, and admitting he had something to hide? Up to now, he has affirmed himself as capable of objectively running an investigation into the presidential campaign. And one more, just to be mean: if Jeff Sessions lied about this important matter while under oath, what else did he lie about?
Just a day after a speech that too many who should know better lauded as a sign that the Trump presidency was entering a realm of normalcy, Sessions' false testimony and recusal remind us that we will not re-enter normal times so long as Donald Trump remains in the White House.