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FOCUS: What Did Trump Know and When Did He Know It? |
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Sunday, 05 March 2017 11:30 |
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Reich writes: "Trump's reaction? He 'wasn't aware' that Sessions had spoken to the ambassador. It's the same response Trump gave when his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was revealed to have been in contact with the Russian ambassador."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
What Did Trump Know and When Did He Know It?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
05 March 17
 ttorney General Jeff Sessions now says he’ll recuse himself from overseeing the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election, citing the advice of his staff.
In reality, it was the advice of numerous congressional Republicans, coming in light of yesterday’s revelations that Sessions lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee when he denied having any contacts with Russian officials during the Trump campaign. (Sessions met twice with Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak, amid suspected Russian hacking directed at Hillary Clinton’s campaign.) Today 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.
Trump’s reaction? He “wasn’t aware” that Sessions had spoken to the ambassador.
It’s the same response Trump gave when his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was revealed to have been in contact with the Russian ambassador.
Eventually the issue will be: What did Trump know and when did he know it?
For now, though, Trump is waiting out the storm over Sessions. Unless Republicans call for Sessions to resign because he lied under oath – committed perjury – recusal is as far as Sessions or the White House will go.
What do you think?
'I Have Recused Myself From Matters With the Trump Campaign’
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If Sessions Had Nothing to Hide, Why Did He Try to Hide It? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29097"><span class="small">Michael Winship, Moyers & Company</span></a>
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Sunday, 05 March 2017 09:23 |
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Winship writes: "There's something out there that has a lot of people scared, but no one's telling the full story. Yet."
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) swears to tell the truth before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be the attorney general on Jan. 10, 2017. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
If Sessions Had Nothing to Hide, Why Did He Try to Hide It?
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
05 March 17
People in power don't investigate themselves. Let's have a special prosecutor to connect the dots of the Russian connection.
 here’s something out there that has a lot of people scared, but no one’s telling the full story. Yet.
For months and weeks, bits and pieces of the continuing saga of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Russian intelligence and its influence on the 2016 elections have been dribbling out, thanks to leaks and solid reporting by a free and independent press.
Eventually we may get to the whole truth, but already it seems clear that deep down, all these secrets coming to light, one by one, are part of a greater, as yet unrevealed, wrong.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo had just the right metaphor:
“Astronomers can’t see black holes directly. They map them by their event horizon and their effect on nearby stars and stellar matter. We can’t see yet what’s at the center of the Trump/Russia black hole. But we can tell a lot about its magnitude by the scope of the event horizon and the degree of its gravitational pull, which is immense.”
Attorney General and Trump loyalist Jeff Sessions did the right thing Thursday afternoon, recusing himself from participating in investigations being undertaken by the Justice Department’s FBI. He jumped before he was pushed; calls for his resignation were getting louder (and haven’t diminished much, despite his announcement).
All of this came after The Washington Post reported Wednesday evening that Sessions had not been forthcoming during his confirmation testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee — that he indeed may have lied under oath.
Here’s The Post:
“At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign. ‘I’m not aware of any of those activities,’ he responded. He added: ‘I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.’”
But he did. Turns out there were two meetings that Sessions had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak — one an informal encounter during a diplomacy conference at last summer’s Republican National Convention and another in Sessions’ Senate office on Sept. 8, at the same time the media was trumpeting news that the FBI and other intelligence agencies were in hot pursuit of evidence that Russia was deliberately hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee to discredit Hillary Clinton and boost the Trump candidacy.
That Kislyak is quite a guy. Like Lamont Cranston, “The Shadow” of the old-time radio show, he apparently has “the power to cloud men’s minds” — no one ever seems to remember their conversations with him. First, recently fired national security adviser Michael Flynn was in denial about talks with him, then Sessions.
Now, according to The New York Times, it seems that the ambassador also met Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner in December meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan, an encounter Flynn attended and apparently engineered.
But that’s not all. USA Today reported Thursday night that, “At least two more members of the Trump campaign’s national security officials [sic] also spoke with Kislyak” at the Republican convention event, “and several more Trump national security advisers were in attendance.” The two in question are J.D. Gordon, the Trump campaign’s director of national security, and Carter Page, that on-again, off-again foreign policy adviser whose name often has popped up in stories about Trump associates who allegedly have been in touch with Russian intelligence — stories Page denies.
Gordon was involved in that brief tussle at the convention platform meetings to successfully tone down an amendment to give “lethal defense weapons” to Ukraine to fight Russian separatists; Page sent a rambling, hyperbolic letter to the Justice Department last month in which he said he had been smeared by the Hillary Clinton campaign over his alleged links to Russia, writing:
“The actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in US history since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly targeted for his antiwar views in the 1960s.”
All of these contacts would not seem quite so significant but for the ongoing investigations and the myriad instances Trump and his campaign have denied any contact at all with Russia — some 20 times since last July. Why so nervous?
Methinks, as the witches in Macbeth pronounce, something wicked this way comes. Wednesday night, The New York Times reported that Obama intelligence officials were so frightened about what they had learned about Russia and Trump they consciously took steps to protect the evidence before Trump took office.
Among those revelations from The Times:
“American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.”
The Trump administration has been told by its lawyer to preserve all evidence. The House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating, and Republicans claim this is enough to get the job done. But any shred of integrity the committees may have had went flying out the window when The Washington Post revealed last week that the White House had persuaded the chairs of each committee, Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Devin Nunes, both Republicans, to call members of the press and discredit intelligence reports that Trump associates had regular contact with Russian officials during the campaign.
There’s only one way to really get the answers. We’ve said it before: Appoint a special prosecutor or create an independent, nonpartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate the whole tangled mess.
Whether Russia’s goal is as basic as getting sanctions against it lifted or a grand scheme by Putin to bedevil and subvert what’s left of Western democracy — not just in America but all over Europe as well — a thorough and honest investigation must take place immediately. We believe that the black hole of a secret is out there. Unless we get to the truth, our government may be inextricably sucked into the gravitational pull of its void.
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Federal Prosecutors Have Brought Charges in Cases Less Serious Than Sessions's |
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Sunday, 05 March 2017 09:20 |
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Excerpt: "As lawyers at the Justice Department and attorneys in private practice who have represented individuals accused in such cases, we can state with assurance: Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases involving far more trivial misstatements and situations far less consequential than whether a nominee to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer misled fellow senators during his confirmation hearings."
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces Thursday that he will recuse himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign. (photo: Susan Wals/AP)
Federal Prosecutors Have Brought Charges in Cases Less Serious Than Sessions's
By Philip Lacovara and Lawrence Robbins, The Washington Post
05 March 17
ttorney General Jeff Sessions made a seemingly false statement under oath during his confirmation hearing. Admittedly, not every potential perjury case gets prosecuted, and Sessions may well have defenses to such a charge. But as lawyers at the Justice Department and attorneys in private practice who have represented individuals accused in such cases, we can state with assurance: Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases involving far more trivial misstatements and situations far less consequential than whether a nominee to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer misled fellow senators during his confirmation hearings.
Sessions’s problematic statement involves his response to a question by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about what he would do as attorney general “if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.” Sessions said he was unaware of any such activities, then volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” In fact, then-Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump campaign adviser, met at least twice during the presidential campaign with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The Post revealed.
As any number of witnesses have learned the hard way, it is a federal felony to lie to Congress. Under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 1001 and 1621, perjury before Congress is punishable by up to five years imprisonment. To prove that offense, a prosecutor would have to establish that Sessions’s answer was false, that he knew it was false when made and that the subject matter of the answer was “material” to the congressional inquiry in which he was testifying.
Those elements all appear to be present. The element of falsity is established by the conceded fact that he did “have communications with the Russians” during the Trump campaign. And there can scarcely be any doubt that the subject matter of Sessions’s answer was highly material to the Senate’s consideration of his nomination. Any suggestion that he participated in the suspected interaction between Trump campaign personnel and the Russian government was, and remains, a matter of grave concern.
That leaves one element: Did Sessions know that his answer was false? He says no, asserting that he understood Franken to be asking only whether he had contact with the Russian government in his capacity as a Trump campaign surrogate. While a jury might accept that defense, there are many reasons to reject it: Sessions’s answer baldly denied any contact. Moreover, Sessions went out of his way to deny contact in response to a question that did not inquire about that subject. By doing so, he preempted an important line of inquiry that might otherwise have been fruitfully pursued.
Certainly there is precedent for a prosecution in this context. Part of the fallout from Watergate included the special prosecutor’s investigation of Richard Kleindienst, who had resigned from his position as attorney general, for alleged false statements during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kleindienst was asked whether the White House had interfered with a Justice Department antitrust action against the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. He stated, “I was not interfered with by anybody at the White House” — but President Nixon and one of his top aides had each called Kleindienst regarding the case. Kleindienst pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for “refus[ing] and fail[ing] to answer accurately and fully” questions at a congressional hearing.
Those facts left no room for any colorable defense on the “knowledge” issue. But when Justice Department officials decide whether to bring a case against Sessions — or, more appropriately, when an independent counsel is appointed and resolves that question — this must be done against the backdrop of other perjury cases that the department has chosen over the years to bring. And the department has prosecuted individuals who advanced defenses very similar to Sessions’s arguments here, often where there was far less at stake.
Years ago, for example, one of us (Robbins) represented a defendant named John Patrick Dowd, accused of lying to a grand jury. Dowd was president of a company that had leased a vessel that had dumped 13,500 tons of Philadelphia incinerator ash into the sea. There was no evidence that Dowd was personally involved in the dumping, but his grand jury testimony led to a perjury indictment. Dowd was acquitted of lying to the grand jury when he testified that he didn’t know where the ash went. Yet he was convicted for his negative response to the question: “You had no idea?” Thus, even a question and answer far vaguer and more ambiguous than the Franken-Sessions exchange were deemed sufficient to justify prosecution.
Or take the classic case of vague questioning: Bronston v. United States. Samuel Bronston had placed his movie production company into bankruptcy and was being questioned about his and the company’s finances. He was asked about, and denied, having any accounts in Swiss banks. Then the obvious follow-up — “Have you ever?” — to which Bronston replied: “The company had an account there for about six months.” What Bronston neglected to mention was that he had a large personal Swiss bank account that he closed when he filed to place his company in bankruptcy.
The Supreme Court held that although his responses may have been deceptive and intended to mislead, they did not constitute perjury because they were literally true, and it was the fault of the questioner that he failed to pursue the inquiry further. The Sessions’s situation presents exactly the opposite scenario: Sessions’s response appears to be both literally false and comprehensive, leaving nothing open for further inquiry regarding the nature of his contacts with the Russian government during the presidential campaign.
A government that has been willing to prosecute relatively small and questionable instances of falsity in connection with matters of comparatively minor importance should have difficulty explaining why Sessions’s testimony would receive a free pass.
Philip Lacovara was counsel to Watergate special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, and also served as deputy U.S. solicitor general responsible for criminal matters, including the “Bronston” case. Lawrence Robbins has been both an assistant U.S. attorney and assistant to the solicitor general. Lacovara is a lifelong Republican; Robbins contributed to and raised money for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The views expressed are their own.
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Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty |
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Saturday, 04 March 2017 15:29 |
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Krugman writes: "The latest big buzz is about Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. It turns out that he lied during his confirmation hearings, denying that he had met with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign."
Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Forbes)
Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
04 March 17
he latest big buzz is about Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. It turns out that he lied during his confirmation hearings, denying that he had met with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. In fact, he met twice with the Russian ambassador, who is widely reported to also be a key spymaster.
Not incidentally, if this news hadn’t come to light, forcing Mr. Sessions to recuse himself, he would have supervised the investigation into Russian election meddling, possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign.
But let’s not focus too much on Mr. Sessions. After all, he is joined in the cabinet by Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who lied to Congress about his use of a private email account; Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, who lied about a sweetheart deal to purchase stock in a biotechnology company at a discount; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, who falsely told Congress that his financial firm didn’t engage in “robo-signing” of foreclosure documents, seizing homes without proper consideration.
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