There are plenty of choice goodies to take away from Jeff Sessions’s testimony on Tuesday. There is the fact that perhaps Sessions is too old to handle the stress of Attorney General, as his memory is clearly failing with how many times he answered questions with some variation of “I cannot recall.” There was the moment when female Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) was shut down by two white Republican men in John McCain and Richard Burr when she was grilling Sessions to give the committee a straight answer.
But there is one moment in the testimony which has been overlooked. Towards the end of the session, Senator Angus King (I-ME) asked Sessions whether he sought any information about Russian attacks on our electoral system in 2016. Sessions said no and admitted that he had “received no briefing on the Russian active measures in connection with the 2016 election.”
The fact that Russia interfered in our election is absolutely undisputable at this point. Look back at the NSA report created right before the election which detailed Russians to tamper with U.S. election and voting infrastructure.
The briefing on Russian active measures which Sessions claimed he never received absolutely existed. Sessions chose not to see them. He chose not to be informed, and to willfully ignore Russian efforts to tamper with our election’s integrity just because Russia was on his side.
Even if we choose to ignore the legal troubles around the Trump administration, this is a troubling sign for leaders who have displayed their willful ignorance at every turn. Whether we are talking about climate change or foreign affairs, Trump and his associates has shown a complete unwillingness to buy into facts that could even slightly contradict their narrative. There is no real difference between ignoring what climate scientists say about the dangers of global warming and ignoring what the NSA says about the dangers of Russian hacking.
An Assault on Truth
To learn is to know the truth of this world. But as the GOP administration (with the exception of Rick Perry, surprisingly) displays no interest in learning, where are they to obtain truth from?
Their great leader, of course. Hence Reince Priebus in that obsequious and bizarre cabinet meeting a few days ago saying that it was an honor to serve Trump’s agenda. But he was as useuful as the drinks cabinet in the White House’s Oval Office. Not the American agenda, not the Republican agenda, not the conservative agenda. Trump’s agenda, because Trump is truth.
Just look at the GOP’s treatment for Robert Mueller to see how to them, reality only exists insofar as it benefits Trump. Trump’s loyalists like Newt Gingrich have gone from praising Mueller when Trump first selected him to calling Mueller an agent of the “deep state” in about a month. All that matters is doing whatever Trump does, even if it means contradicting yourself from one tweet to the next or ignoring the advice of experts.
Unfortunately for a GOP who wants to redefine the world to suit Trump’s wishes, objective reality has a nasty habit of intruding no matter how hard you wish for it to go away. And the party’s clear lack of interest in learning and truth will hurt them in the end, whether in the polls, in court, or the abject failure of their policies.