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.