What do Republicans want from Attorney General Jeff Sessions? And what does that have to do with Hillary Clinton or Roy Moore? Yesterday, when Sessions testified, for more than four hours, before the House Judiciary Committee, Democrat after Democrat asked some variation of the question of whether he’d perjured himself in his confirmation hearings, last January. That was when Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, asked about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians, and Sessions said that he, as a campaign surrogate, did not meet with Russians or know of any such ties. It has since emerged that Sessions met with the Russian Ambassador to the United States and was at a campaign meeting where Russian contacts were mentioned. For various reasons, mostly having to do with the tricks of memory, the specific wording that Franken has used, and, Sessions said yesterday, how shocked he had been by the question’s premise, he maintained that he was neither lying at those hearings nor lying now. For obvious reasons, the Democrats weren’t satisfied. Their Republican colleagues tried to defend the Attorney General, but that effort, too, was strained and, at times, came at a cost to Sessions.
“It seems like, to me, you got mistreated a little bit,” Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas, began. Gohmert, who has, in the past, pushed baseless theories ranging from birtherism to an incipient federal-jihadi invasion of Texas, said that he didn’t think that Sessions had lied and he didn’t need a media outlet like Mother Jones (which one of the Democrats had cited) to tell him otherwise. Then he asked Sessions whether, in deciding earlier this year to recuse himself—presumably, this was a reference to Sessions’s recusal from the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election, though one never knows with Gohmert—he had consulted with his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Sessions seemed unsure of how much he should say about internal deliberations, and also of where Gohmert was heading. Gohmert interrupted to read a string of e-mail addresses, at least one ending in .ru, and brandished a filing in a 2015 case involving money laundering and an executive at a Russian-state-linked, uranium-exporting company called Tenex. One of the names on the document, filed in a federal court in Maryland, was that of Rosenstein, who was then a U.S. attorney in that state. “So you were not aware that Rosenstein had had this prior dealing with Russian uranium before you recused yourself, had you?” As Sessions tried to get Gohmert to clarify, the congressman continued, “You were not aware of the Mueller-Comey investigation into Russian uranium, were you, before you recused yourself?”
“Nuh—ah,” Sessions began, with a nervous laugh, “I don’t think so.” Then he brightened, and said more definitely, “No, I was not, of course, I wasn’t in the Department of Justice.” Gohmert told him that he had a chart explaining it all—the camera turned to a tortured piece of political art, linking boxes of various shapes and colors that contained names and phrases like Rosatom (another Russian energy firm), Huma Abedin, “Hillary Clinton Secret Server,” “Fast & Furious,” and “executive privilege,” along with Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. Gohmert’s point seemed to be that Sessions had somehow been tricked into the recusal. “It sure stinks to high heaven, and it doesn’t appear to me they ought to be involved in investigating,” Gohmert said, as, at last, his time expired. Sessions, before the next questioner began, took a moment to try to sort all that out, or at least to defend Rosenstein. The transaction at the heart of what is roughly referred to as the Clinton uranium story is the acquisition, in 2010, of a company called Uranium One, which owned uranium resources in the United States, by a subsidiary of Rosatom called ARMZ—a name that, remarkably, was not on the Gohmert chart. (During the campaign, I wrote about the issues involved.) The Maryland case had taken place a couple of years later, “and it’s really unrelated to the allegations about Uranium One, as I understand it,” Sessions said.
This doesn’t mean that Sessions’s Justice Department isn’t interested in Clinton and uranium. On Monday, the department sent a letter to certain members of the House Judiciary Committee, in response to inquiries, saying that, while it wouldn’t want to confirm the existence of any investigation, it had begun to “evaluate certain issues” that the representatives had raised, “including the sale of Uranium One, alleged unlawful dealings related to the Clinton Foundation, and other matters.” The department would also see whether any such matters “merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.” In other words, the Administration of Donald Trump might be trying to make good on his campaign promise, with regard to Hillary Clinton, to “lock her up.” Whether the motive is retribution or distraction from Trump’s own Russia troubles, this would be a blatantly political use of the executive branch’s investigative powers. Trump isn’t particularly shy about that: indeed he has, as President, asked on Twitter why Sessions isn’t “looking into crooked Hillary crimes and Russia relations.”
Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, who quoted that tweet when he questioned Sessions, also asked about Sessions’s recusal, though in a way that made much more sense than Gohmert’s questions had. Conyers wanted to know why Sessions’s reason for withdrawing from the Russian-interference investigation—namely, that he had been a part of the Trump campaign—didn’t apply just as much to an inquiry into Trump’s campaign opponent. “I cannot answer that yes or no, because, under the policies of the Department of Justice, to announce recusal in any investigation would reveal the existence of that investigation,” Sessions replied. “And the top ethics officials have advised me I should not do so.”
But even a politicized Justice Department investigation that might lead to a special counsel was not enough for some of the Republicans on the committee. They wanted a special counsel—just like Mueller, only, with any luck, indicting Clinton-campaign officials—right now. “What’s it going to take to get a special counsel?” the Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who was yelling, as he tends to do, asked Sessions. He followed that question with a stream of words and names, many of which had appeared on Gohmert’s chart—Loretta Lynch, Benghazi, “Bill Clinton on a tarmac,” Uranium One, F.B.I. informants, Mueller—before demanding again, “What’s it going to take?”
“It would take a factual basis that meets the standards of the appointment of the special counsel,” Sessions said, adding that, “sometimes we have to study the facts.” Jordan said that he had some facts, involving Clinton campaign money that went, via a lawyer, to the firm that assembled a dossier about Trump’s ties to Russia—or, as Jordan saw it, in another shouted riff, the story of how “a major political party was working with the federal government to then turn an opposition-research document, the equivalent of a National Enquirer story, into an intelligence document, take that to the FISA court, so that they could then get a warrant to spy on Americans associated with the Trump campaign. That’s what it looks like.” Perhaps a chart would help?
Congressional hearings, these days, can manage the trick of being both fervid and dull, a mix of invectives and dodged questions. And so it was notable, early in the hearing, when Sessions gave a clear answer to Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, about Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate seat that Sessions had held before joining Donald Trump’s cabinet. Jackson Lee noted that five women had come forward with accounts of Moore’s predatory behavior toward them when they were teen-agers. One had been fourteen; another said that she had had to fight Moore off when he sexually assaulted her. (Moore has denied the charges.) “Do you believe these young women?” Jackson Lee asked.
“I have no reason to doubt these young women,” Sessions replied. Fewer and fewer people do. Moore can’t be removed from the ballot, but the Republicans—who might have realized that he was a problem back, say, when he said that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress—have been searching for alternatives to conceding that the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, might just deserve to win. The options have involved everything from write-ins to having Moore expelled once he gets to the Senate, and several involve Sessions, who Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, said on Tuesday might be a good person to refill the seat. (“Saturday Night Live” suggested the same idea.) At one point yesterday, Sessions, defending himself against the charge that he had lied to Franken, referred to the senators as his “colleagues”—but otherwise there is little indication that Sessions actually wants his old job back. He seemed to enjoy it, during the hearing, when, between questions about Russia, he was asked about things like controlling the borders and possibly prosecuting Planned Parenthood. Sessions, like his party, has many priorities. In the end, it’s all connected.
