In one particular part of a remarkable open letter to citizens of Alabama, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions finally makes a crucial point about why he recused himself from the controversial investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Sessions’s critics, including President Trump, have been intellectually dishonest (or worse) in failing to acknowledge the importance of this point, which I have made here before at length. Sessions himself hadn’t exactly done so, apparently because he was loath to contradict Trump directly. The point is this: Sessions recused himself not just because he was vaguely “part of the campaign” that was being investigated but because he himself was a specific subject of that investigation.
“I did what the law required me to do,” Sessions wrote. “I was a central figure in the campaign and was also a subject of and witness in the investigation and could obviously not legally be involved in investigating myself.”
Repeat: He was a subject. Page 12 of the Mueller report said this very clearly. Sessions therefore was obliged, logically and ethically, to recuse himself.
Furthermore, for those who refuse to understand the politics of this, Sessions’s recusal did not harm Trump but instead avoided worse harm: “If I had ignored and broken the law, the Democrats would have used that to severely damage the president.”
To that, the ignorant critics say Sessions should not have taken the job if he knew he would need to recuse himself. How absurd. Again, I explained this more than a year ago, but now, Sessions finally says it for himself: “I knew no such thing. I wasn’t informed of Comey’s secret investigation until after I became Attorney General.” Furthermore, it was even later that Sessions not only knew of the investigation but knew he had become a subject thereof. Even after that, he needed to take the time to run the question through the Justice Department’s ethics office, which informed him that recusal was necessary.
To say that Sessions should have known he would need to recuse himself from an investigation he didn’t know existed and one in which he was not even originally a suspect, is to turn logic on its head. To continue to make that claim even after these points are noted is to do so not just illogically, but maliciously.
Once the investigation was complete, though, Sessions correctly says he was “fully exonerated.”
Considering “the wording and context” of questions senators asked Sessions, wrote special counsel Robert Mueller, the “evidence … makes it plausible that Sessions did not recall discussing the campaign” with the Russian diplomat. Furthermore, on another question about his very brief interactions with the diplomat, “given the context in which the question was asked,” again, Sessions’s explanation was “plausible.”
Mueller writes (p. 198) that his office “therefore determined not to pursue charges against Sessions and informed his counsel of that decision in March 2018.”
If Mueller confirms Sessions was under investigation (under misguided charges) until March 2018, how could Sessions possibly have overseen that same investigation for the full previous year?
Meanwhile, for those, including Trump, who say Sessions, on a parallel track, at least should have ensured that Hillary Clinton didn’t escape scrutiny, they also are dead wrong. Sessions asked the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the handling of the Clinton case and then later designated a U.S. attorney to reexamine it from top to bottom.
In sum, Sessions did everything by the book while carrying out Trump’s agenda on every other front. Trump fans should be pleased, not angered, by Sessions’s service as attorney general.
