This story has become so familiar that it’s become the theme song of the Trump campaign. Yet again, when presented an opportunity to fess up about spending time with Russian officials, a member of the Trump campaign, Trump transition team, and Trump cabinet failed to raise a hand.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not disclose meetings he had last year with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance, the Justice Department told CNN Wednesday.
The meetings are the same meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Sessions also failed to note when he was chatting with the Senate to secure his position as attorney general. Now that he has the role of of making sure everyone follows the rules, he’s still simply ignoring the rules.
Sessions’ argument is that he met Kislyak “in his role as a senator” rather than as a representative of Trump and, since he met “hundreds” of foreign officials during his time in the Senate, he didn’t have to list any of them. Which, seems to be completely counter to the actual law.
A Republican congressman said Wednesday night that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should have known better than to fail to disclose meetings with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance.
Sessions’ failure to report the Russian meetings on his security forms isn’t a great revelation. It doesn’t add new strands to the Trump–Russia connections. It doesn’t really change anyone’s view of Sessions.
What it does is show that, even after everything else that’s happened, Trump officials—including the man whose job it is to see that the law is followed—are still failing to follow the law and minimizing their interaction with Russia.
Responding to the news during an interview on CNN's "Erin Burnett Outfront," Rep. Will Hurd, of Texas, said oversharing would be "a good strategy" and that because of the "intense scrutiny he knew he was going to go under, oversharing is probably better than undersharing."
Sessions also came under fire from Democrats when he failed to disclose the same meetings with Kislyak at his confirmation hearing earlier this year.
It’s not a revelation, it’s another nail in a long, long line that drives home the idea that, at best, the Trump regime still seems to feel that the rules aren’t really the rules, they can report what they want, and that pretending they did nothing wrong is the best strategy. It can also be seen as another illustration of the deliberate effort to minimize the involvement of the campaign with Russia. Because “undersharing” is just a nice term for “cover-up.”