Attorney General Jefferson Sessions has been very busy completely wrecking the Justice Department and trying to smash the First Amendment. Plus, Sessions has a notably bad memory.
So maybe he just can’t recall if Donald Trump asked him to block the investigation into connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee expressed concern Thursday after Attorney General Jeff Sessions declined to answer whether President Trump ever asked him to obstruct the Russia investigation.
"I asked the attorney general whether he was ever instructed by the president to take any action that he believed would hinder the Russia investigation and he declined to answer the question," Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told reporters after the closed-door meeting concluded.
Sessions, like other Trump officials, has been adhering to a previously unknown form of executive privilege—one where everything Trump said, even in public, is protected, whether anyone actually requests any kind of protection or not, and without anyone needing to say the words “executive privilege.” However, there’s a problem with that position in this instance.
"If the president did not instruct him to take any action that he believed would hinder the Russia investigation, he should say so. If the president did instruct him to hinder the investigation in any way, in my view, that would be a potentially criminal act and certainly not covered by any privilege," the California Democrat continued.
Actually, there’s a problem with the non-privilege-privilege level of lip-lock the Trump team has been taking in every instance. They want to get all the benefits of privilege, without ever facing any challenge by living in a undefined state where no law applies. But no matter how they want to play this, there seems to be no reason Sessions couldn’t say Trump didn’t try to block the investigation.
Unless he did.
Not only has Sessions demonstrated that he apparently can’t remember anything since the start of this sentence, but his appearances in front of the committee have included straight out lies.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions once claimed he wasn’t “aware” of any contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Here's some very bad news for Jeff Sessions: the picture of him attending this March 31, 2016, meeting, tweeted out by Donald Trump, also appears to be the same meeting in which Trump aide George Papadopoulos made clear that he did indeed have Russian connections willing to help Trump's candidacy.
But no matter how many times Sessions lies, it never seems to be enough to generate any response, or even concern, from Republicans in Congress. That includes failing to tell Congress that he had personally discussed the Trump campaign face-to-face with the Russian ambassador.
However, in this case, it may be more than “memory problems” that keep Sessions from answering the question. Sessions is well aware that the reason Trump wanted former FBI director James Comey fired is because Comey refused to drop the Russia investigation. Sessions was in that up to his elfin ears.
The question really is: what else did Trump ask Sessions to do to interfere with the investigation?