-By Warner Todd Huston
Thursday’s witch hunt against Trump’s U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions — once again over the media’s new favorite attack of pushing fake “Russia ties” — really shows just how far the media is willing to go to torpedo Donald Trump and to assist the weakling Democrat Party retake power in Washington D.C.
The morning’s witch hunt started with the Old Media establishment attacking Sessions for “lying” to Senator Al “Stuart Smalley” Franken about his meetings with Russian officials. After the media said Sessions “lied” to Franken about meeting Russian officials various and sundry Democrats then piled on alternately demanding that Sessions “recuse himself” from any investigations into the non-existent “hacking” of the election by the Russians and calling for him to “resign.” Then the media picked up on the Democrats empty bellicosity and started the cycle all over again.
Before we get to the other hypocrisies of the attack, we have to clear up this “lying to Franken” nonsense.
During his confirmation hearing for Attorney General, Minnesota Democrat Al Franken asked Senator Sessions if he spoke to the Russians about Donald Trump’s campaign.
Franken asked Sessions if he knew anything about “a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.” Sessions replied saying, “I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”
Clearly Franken was asking if Sessions talked to the Russians during the election as a “surrogate” working for Donald Trump. Sessions did not and there is no evidence he did.
But since the confirmation, the left moved the goal posts claiming that Sessions “lied” about meeting Russian officials. Liberal news “reporters” began braying that in the last year or two Sessions did meet with Russian officials during his duty as a Senator and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, so that ipso facto means he “lied” to Senator Franken and perjured himself during the confirmation hearings.
This is a BS attack, though. Sessions wasn’t asked if he ever met with Russian officials at all. He was asked if he met with Russian officials “as a surrogate for Donald Trump.” Sessions never denied he met Russian officials when he was performing his duty as a Senator. Therefore, he never lied about anything.
Don’t take my word for it. The law profs at LawNews.com noted that there is no reading of the law that would force Sessions to resign over this purported “lie.”
Even reporter Philip Bump from the left-wing Washington Post says that he doesn’t see how Sessions could face any perjury charges for his comments during his confirmation hearings.
Bump went on to say “I’m starting to think that a lot of perceptions of the facts in the Russia-Trump question are colored by partisanship.” He also said he thought the Democrats were “overplaying their hand” on the whole issue.
Regardless, once this false accusation and misleading characterization of the matter hit the media, Democrats crawled out of their hovels to whiny for Sessions to “resign” for telling a “lie.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D, MO), for instance, jumped to twitter to criticize Sessions.
Nope, never met a Russian. Ah, but wait, first in 2013 then in 2015, we get the same Senator dutifully telling her constituents that she is off to meet… the Russians?
There is even a photo of McCaskill meeting a Russian official.
![]("https://publiusforum1.wpenginepowered.com/images/sessions_images/mccaskill_russia_tweet_04.jpgp)
Looks like she fell right into the truth trap. She lied to attack Sessions, yet her own actions were shown to be based on a lie.
Another Democrat Senator essentially outed McCaskill as a liar. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin couldn’t understand how McCaskill could say they’ve never met with Russian officials. After all, he noted, “we all have.”
Manchin also insisted that nearly every Senator has met with Russian officials at one time or another because it’s their job as senators to do so.
Twitchy.com had some fun with the McCaskill’s lie, too. If meeting with a Russian is now a crime, the website said, then up to 30 Senators will have to quit.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) joined in the fun by proclaiming Sessions a “liar” who must resign.
For his part, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) also brayed for Sessions to resign. Schumer went even farther by demanding that an Obama-appointed perfunctory be assigned as a “special prosecutor” to “investigate Russian meddling in the election.”
This is amusing at best considering the fact that Barack Obama himself insisted that there was no hacking of the election by the Russians. Early in December, President Obama told the “Daily Show’s” Trevor Noah that he and his operatives saw “no evidence” of any Russian hacking during the 2016 elections.
Naturally, once Schumer called for Sessions to resign, the Obamabots on Twitter warmed up their fake accounts to blanket the social media platform with fake tweets pretending to be “normal people” calling for Sessions to go.
There is quite a lot of hypocrisy about all this, of course. For years the Clintons took literally billions of dollars from Russians and dozens of other foreign nations and not a single member of the Old Media establishment or the Democrat Party much cared about foreign influences in American politics.
In fact, Obama did his best to meddle in the electoral affairs of other nations. When Benjamin Netanyahu ran for re-election, Obama actually sent his own operatives to Israel to work against Natanyahu’s re-election. And Obama spent our tax dollars to do it.
The day ended with the Democrats losing their game. By the afternoon, Senator Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from any Justice Department investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
But since there wasn’t any such interference, Sessions won’t have to worry about it.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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