In testimony before the U.S. Senate yesterday, Sen. Franken of Minnesota asked Attorney General Sessions about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Sessions’s shifting statements about his contacts with representatives of Putin’s government.
Sessions’s answers, in content and demeanor, are odd: he sounds hesitant, nervous, defensive, and almost beleaguered. Franken’s intelligent, but honestly one would expect someone serving as attorney general to be so, too. One may meet difficult questions, but difficult questions are not impossible ones; an experienced, competent attorney and former legislator should be able to reply calmly and knowledgeably.
Sessions, at about the eight-minute mark on the video, tries to refute the contention that he testified falsely – and by implication deliberately so – when he, Sessions formerly testified that he “did not have communications” with members of the Russian government. Sessions contends that his broad & general denial of “communications with the Russians” merely applied to a narrow & specific report of a U.S. intelligence intercepts.
That’s unpersuasive, to the point of ridiculousness. When a man is accused of petting a poodle, and then answers that he’s never had contact with dogs, he cannot persuasively contend that he’s answered only regarding poodles.
Astonishingly, Sessions then offers that “you can say what you want about the accuracy of it [his earlier testimony], but I think it was a good faith response…”
If Sessions’s general denial is a good faith response to a specific question, then vast amounts of false testimony would be made legitimate as good faith efforts.
Men accused of petting curly-haired dogs, who deny falsely that they’ve ever touched any canines, are not answering in good faith.