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You are here: Home / Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / Drip… Drip… Drip: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Recuses Himself

Drip… Drip… Drip: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Recuses Himself

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The NYTimes [warning: autoplay]:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing a chorus of criticism over his contacts with the Russian ambassador, recused himself Thursday from any current or future investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. His conversations with the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, came amid suspected Russian hacking directed at Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Mr. Sessions said he made the decision after meeting with senior career officials at the Justice Department. He said he would not take part in any investigations “related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.”

Mr. Sessions said “I don’t recall” whether Mr. Trump or the presidential election, which was then two months away, came up in the discussion with the ambassador.

The remarks by Mr. Sessions came not long after President Trump on Thursday expressed his support for Mr. Sessions and said he should not recuse himself from the investigation. Mr. Sessions was a key adviser and surrogate for Mr. Trump’s campaign…

Reader Interactions

99Comments

  1. 1.

    zhena gogolia

    I have to say, I’m getting my money’s worth from that monthly donation to ACLU.

  3. 3.

    TenguPhule

    Mr. Sessions said “I don’t recall” whether Mr. Trump or the presidential election, which was then two months away, came up in the discussion with the ambassador.

    I’m certain 48 hours of waterboarding will get the truth out of him.

  6. 6.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Every last Rethuglican elected official in this country should be compelled to Take The Black.

  7. 7.

    japa21

    “Meddling in the campaign” is old news. The more important question is how much influence Russia is having over our policy decisions. Not if they were meddling but if there was some quid pro quo involved.

  12. 12.

    Ian G.

    Is Nunes threatening the press there?

    This is why I’m fine with a slow, soft coup d’etat by the FBI and/or CIA. Because the normal checks on the presidency are working about as well as one would expect from the North Korean people’s assembly.

    Anyway, I will never not enjoy the Shitgibbon White House not stepping on its own dick. Yesterday’s press celebration of his not literally taking a dump on the podium seems like ancient history.

  13. 13.

    dmsilev

    jeff sessions: lying under oath to a senat confirmation hearing isn’t *that* big of a deal

    Has anyone gone digging to see if Sessions had any public statements from 1998 or so re: Bill Clinton?

  14. 14.

    Shalimar

    @japa21: The acts may be old, but the news would be new if it hasn’t been reported before. The deeper they dig, the more likely they are to find out the quid pro quo. Given Trump’s history and all of the smoke, there has to be a fire.

  16. 16.

    JPL

    @TenguPhule: If the Trump administration is dealing with a foreign government against our interests, then water boarding could elicit some results.

  21. 21.

    sigaba

    @japa21: Do you think Russia has much to say about internal American policy? I think they’d be happy to let the Republicans run the US as their satrapy as long as Russia gets a free hand against Ukraine and Europe generally.

  22. 22.

    TenguPhule

    @JPL: At this point, why bother putting if in front of it? Just waterboard him, get the confession, then chop his head off and mount it on a spiky pike.

  24. 24.

    D58826

    Now that Sessions has reused himself, who is left that has the integrity and public trust to oversee the investigation? There is no Deputy AG just the fill in guy from when Yates was fired. If we go the special prosecutor route who has the integrity to pick one and who has the integrity to actually be the SP? Same can be said for an independent commission. We are a long way from Sam Irvin and Howard Baker.

    And then who does the actually leg work of the investigation? The FBI appears to be fatally compromised at this point. I would not trust Comey to tell me that the Sun comes up in the east.

    The right/GOP/Faux news/Kochopus have spent the past 40 years de-legitimizing every institution in our society. We are now at the point that there is no one left that reasonable people on both sides of the political divide will trust.

  25. 25.

    japa21

    I see Trump brought up the Romney claim that the Navy is the smallest it has been since WWI.

  26. 26.

    pk

    Is there anyone in this administration who is not working for the Russians? Is the cleaning lady also a Russian spy? Funny how they want immigrants to be assimilated and question their loyalty. But as long as you’re white male and republican all is good, even treason.

  32. 32.

    debbie

    @Mike J:

    It’s becoming obvious that this Russian envoy was the belle of the ball. Wonder if his dance card was totally filled?

  33. 33.

    gratuitous

    I’m going to have to look it up, I suppose, so I can give proper credit (for now, I’ll call it The Unknown Twitterer Rule): Nothing about the Trump administration ever turns out to be better than expected. Every time you hear the first sketchy reports about some transgression, the reality turns out to be worse than first reported. Every time.

    So, Attorney General Sessions has recused himself from investigating his contacts with our good friends the Russians. Hooray, I guess? How about you motate your worthless carcass out of the Department of Justice altogether, Mr. Sessions?

  39. 39.

    Gravenstone

    @dmsilev: oh he most assuredly did. Self righteous little prick was all aghast that Clinton hadn’t resigned in shame already.

  40. 40.

    Mike J

    @debbie:

    It’s becoming obvious that this Russian envoy was the belle of the ball. Wonder if his dance card was totally filled?

    Michael Weiss‏ Verified account @michaeldweiss
    Evan Perez just said it on CNN, so I suppose I can here: Kislyak wasn’t just ambassador, he was Russia’s “top spy recruiter” in D.C.: SVR.

  41. 41.

    TenguPhule

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: At this point, its the bare minimum required for reestablishing the Republic. Why bother pretending otherwise? Voting in a new Democratic majority is not going to fix the underlying problem at its source. The Republicans are a party of Treasonous Fuckers who are determined to kill or enslave all the non-Republicans. There is no crime or savagery they will not stoop to to keep power.

  42. 42.

    Anne Laurie

    @gratuitous:

    I’m going to have to look it up, I suppose, so I can give proper credit (for now, I’ll call it The Unknown Twitterer Rule): Nothing about the Trump administration ever turns out to be better than expected. Every time you hear the first sketchy reports about some transgression, the reality turns out to be worse than first reported. Every time.

    That was Tom Scocca. I’ll let you read his feed to find the original tweets!

  47. 47.

    debbie

    @Mike J: @Mike J:

    Interesting. Wikipedia says he’s been ambassador since 2008. I guess he was conveniently there to comfort the Republicans in their sorrow following their loss to Obama.

  48. 48.

    Aleta

    Following the end of the cold war and throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Sweden scaled back its military and defence spending dramatically as it believed in a more peaceful world. The trend culminated in the scrapping of conscription in 2010. That makes Thursday’s decision by Sweden to bring back the draft, this time for both young women and men, so striking. “There was a naivety in the world about what was happening in Russia. There were many countries and people in foreign service that didn’t want to see what had really happened, the signals when Russia upgraded its capabilities,” Sweden’s defence minister, Peter Hultqvist, told the Financial Times recently. Still, the reintroduction of conscription from the start of next year is only one in a series of measures that the centre-left government in Stockholm has taken in recent years as it scrambles to adapt its enfeebled defence forces to a rising threat from Russia.

    https://www.ft.com/content/f7cb9f56-ff45-11e6-96f8-3700c5664d30
    https://www.ft.com/content/f7cb9f56-ff45-11e6-96f8-3700c5664d30

  50. 50.

    smintheus

    For decades the GOP acts like compromise is the worst sin of all. Now it doesn’t care a bit how compromised Trump is vis a vis the Russians.

  51. 51.

    Chris

    @D58826:

    The right/GOP/Faux news/Kochopus have spent the past 40 years de-legitimizing every institution in our society. We are now at the point that there is no one left that reasonable people on both sides of the political divide will trust.

    It helps that the reasonable people are all concentrated on one side of the political divide.

  52. 52.

    delk

    Mr. Sessions said “I don’t recall” whether Mr. Trump or the presidential election, which was then two months away, came up in the discussion with the ambassador.

    Is he suffering from dementia?

  53. 53.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Villago Delenda Est: Yeah, but then they’d just sell the Wall to the Others.

    This is, of course, after they promised to build an even bigger Wall and make the Others pay for it.

  55. 55.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Ian G.: Sure sounds as if Nunes is threatening the press. I wonder why one of the journalists/reporters didn’t call him out on that.

  56. 56.

    Cacti

    I don’t want to see the Trump administration embarrassed so much as I want to see it tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.

  59. 59.

    JPL

    Putin likes to keep a clean house. How long before the stress gets to Kislyak, and he suffers a heart attack.

  60. 60.

    XTPD

    The post “So Much for the SOTU” was announced on Twitter at six but isn’t up on the site yet. Admins?

  65. 65.

    efgoldman

    @TenguPhule:

    Corrected.

    Too good for them. I want them all forced to resign, to get bankrupted by their defense lawyers, get disbarred, and find out about bridges, coat hangers, and sparrows.

  66. 66.

    Roger Moore

    @Ian G.:

    This is why I’m fine with a slow, soft coup d’etat by the FBI and/or CIA.

    I’d question the description of this as a coup. I finally realized what I dislike about the whole “deep state” meme. For those who don’t know “deep state” is a translation from Turkish, where it’s used to describe the tendency of the security apparatus to see itself as the guardian of the secular state, including a willingness to overthrow any government it sees as excessively religious. IOW, it’s a claim that the US security state is threatening to overthrow Trump because they don’t like his politics.

    But that’s not the case. The primary function of the security state is to protect the country against other countries interfering with our affairs. That’s normally seen in a military sense, but organizations like the CIA and NSA are supposed to guard against other kinds of international interference. If the Russians did interfere with our election, it’s the job of the security state to investigate what happened, let the country know, and to try to do something about it. It’s crazy to act as if they should just ignore foreign interference with an election as somehow not worth defending against.

  67. 67.

    jharp

    Devin Nunes must be in on it.

    No way could he be that fucking stupid. It’s panic. He has to know he’s fucked if this continues

  68. 68.

    p.a.

    @JPL: Pooty-poot wins no matter what! If the tRumpist Rethugs are actually fellow-travellers, he wins. If his scheme of influence collapses, US democratic institutions are in tatters anyway.

  69. 69.

    MomSense

    The little shit elf only recused himself from investigations concerning 45s campaign NOT the transition and whatever else may still be occurring.

  72. 72.

    Chris

    @Roger Moore:

    I always thought “deep state” when applied to the U.S. was simply a reference to the phenomenon of intelligence or security agencies following their own lights regardless of political oversight or accountability. Which isn’t the thing here that it is in Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt or wherever, but in milder forms, does still happen – J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI being the most blatant example. That’s different from agencies actually overthrowing governments or whatnot.

  73. 73.

    D58826

    @Chris: true. I’m old enough to remember when the ‘middle’ was moderately conservative R’s and D’s to moderately liberal R’s and D’s. With the D’s (southern ones excluded) tending to cluster moderate to liberal and the R’s clustering moderate to conservative. And they actually talked to each other, in public no less

  75. 75.

    Fair Economist

    @Roger Moore: We are past worrying about involvement of the “deep state” in politics. The critics of the IC are blithely ignoring the well-established fact that a faction in the FBI, including Comey, worked extremely hard on getting Trump elected – both by making repeated public announcements about a nothingburger investigation of Clinton’s emails and by actively suppressing investigations of actually significant contacts between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. We are already through that particular looking glass, and if we weren’t there wouldn’t be a cadre of foreign agents running our government.

    As you point out, for the rest of the deep state to take action to protect American democracy from foreign control is called for and entirely appropriate. After that we have to look at the crooked FBI faction that was willing to hand the country over to the Russians to keep somebody they didn’t like out of office. Only after both threats to the country have been fixed can we look at keeping the deep state out of regular politics again.

  76. 76.

    different-church-lady

    CNN web headline right now:

    AG says he won’t be part of any investigations of presidential campaigns

    “…because we’re not going to let any happen.”

  78. 78.

    Chris

    @D58826:

    I think it helps that both parties have historically been loose coalitions of regional and local party organizations that were as likely to agree with elements of the other party as with each other; even when there were trends in one or the other direction, both parties have had liberal, conservative, and moderate members for most of their history. The kind of ideological polarization you’re seeing now is really recent.

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @debbie:

    It’s becoming obvious that this Russian envoy was the belle of the ball. Wonder if his dance card was totally filled?

    No one knows. It’s apparently impossible to remember any interaction with the Russian ambassador. I’m starting to wonder if his genes were used to create The Silence.

  81. 81.

    Bill Arnold

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    These guys are painting themselves into a corner that has no exit.

    That’s what’s disquieting about this. There will be temptations to engineer an exit from painting themselves into a corner. So to speak.
    And it’s rather hard to estimate the probabilities of such scenarios (e.g. major false flag operation of some sort, but there are others), because the current U.S. political situation is already such chaotic outlier. (With Nukes. OK, I’ll stop. :-)

  82. 82.

    Millard Filmore

    @zhena gogolia:

    Was that the SOTU? I notice people don’t call it that. If not, what was it?

    A speech in front of a Joint Session of Congress.

  83. 83.

    amk

    With these lying pos, the only way to ‘recuse’ is to fucking resign. Otherwise, it’ll all be bs coverup by this cabal.

  84. 84.

    Roger Moore

    @p.a.:

    Pooty-poot wins no matter what!

    Not necessarily. If he gets convincingly caught, it will make it much harder for him to interfere with elections anywhere in the future, and Russia is likely to become even more of a pariah with democracies.

  85. 85.

    TenguPhule

    @efgoldman: I don’t want to give the Traitorous Fuckers another chance to slime back into power by convincing the idiots who vote that they should.

  86. 86.

    Lurking Canadian

    @Villago Delenda Est: I was thinking today how the Trump era seems to be motivated by Game of Thrones. One of the features of life in Westeros is that following the rules is for suckers. Keeping your word, following the law, whatever. If it’s convenient at the time, do it, otherwise, it’s “you and whose army”?

    That’s how Trump has lived his whole life. And it seems it is also Republican SOP.

    We need dragons and we need them now

  87. 87.

    Shalimar

    @sigaba: I thought it was strange for Sessions to be one of the people meeting with Kislyak. Why would Russia care about anything the future Attorney General can influence?

  88. 88.

    Shalimar

    @zhena gogolia: no State of the Union for a president starting his first term, presumably because he is still learning the details of how the union is doing. The joint address was Trump deciding to have one anyway, but at least not calling it a SOTU.

  89. 89.

    Roger Moore

    @Chris:
    The point I’m making is that the specific description of the CIA/NSA/etc. being the “deep state” is something that’s started happening very recently, and it’s fairly explicitly a reference to the Turkish situation, which is where the term comes from. The people who use it have chosen the term quite deliberately because of its sinister associations.

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