Washington is engrossed in a debate over whether or not Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath in his confirmation hearing in his response to Sen. Al Franken’s question about Trump campaign contact contact with Russian officials. Now that we know Sessions did speak to the Russian ambassador in 2016, the disagreement has mostly focused on whether or not Sessions’ denial of contact with Russian officials was a clear lie, a truthful assertion that he did not have contact in his capacity as a representative of the Trump campaign, or something in between meant to obfuscate the truth. But there’s a weird aspect to all of this that’s being neglected: Sessions did not have to volunteer that he didn’t have contact with the Russians, because Franken never asked him about it.
In the relevant part of the exchange, which was posted by my colleague Pete Kasperowicz, Franken mentions a CNN story about ongoing contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. Franken then asks Sessions: “if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”
So Franken was actually asking Sessions, were he confirmed as attorney general, how he would handle evidence about any communications. Sessions could have dismissed the question, saying he doesn’t want to respond to hypotheticals. Or, he could have given a generic answer, such as saying that as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, he would always want to make sure that the law was followed and that evidence of wrongdoing was properly evaluated.
But he did neither of those things. Instead, he responded to a question that Franken never asked, about whether he had contact with Russians. “Sen. Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”
Whether or not you believe Sessions was being honest in his testimony, given that he knew he had met with the Russian ambassador and that this would likely become public at some point, it’s weird that he would say something that could come back to haunt him given that he wasn’t even pressed into doing so.
