After Sessions’ performance yesterday, can anyone be surprised that Special Counsel Mueller is looking into obstruction of justice charges? Thanks to the Washington Post 202 for these citations and quotations:
HOW THE HEARING IS PLAYING:
- Matt Zapotosky: “Sessions finds a shield in executive privilege — but it might not be a strong one.”
- Amber Phillips: “Sessions appears to have contradicted himself several times. … About the only thing Sessions can recall for sure is that he didn’t do anything wrong.”
- Philip Bump: “Sessions’s testimony highlights Trump’s deep lack of interest in what Russia did in 2016.”
- Right Turn’s Jennifer Rubin: “Sessions wilts on the hot seat.”
- Plum Line’s Sarah Posner: “Sessions’s testimony raises more questions than it answers.”
- The Fix’s Callum Borchers: “Sessions wants you to do what he wouldn’t — distinguish between his roles as senator and surrogate.”
- Politico: “Sessions and his deputy show some daylight.” From Josh Gerstein and Seung Min Kim: “One such moment came when Sessions testified that Comey likely had an obligation to notify Congress when new evidence emerged in the probe into Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails last October. … However, the letter Rosenstein wrote last month as part of the process of firing Comey indicated that the FBI director actually should have remained mum. … Sessions had appeared to endorse Rosenstein’s memo last month, so it was surprising that he took the opposite position at one point on Tuesday.”
- The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey: “Sessions’ non-answers do nothing to dispel questions.”
- USA Today’s Susan Page: “Jeff Sessions defends Jeff Sessions. But what about Donald Trump?”
- The New York Times’s Andrew Rosenthal: “Sessions Gives a Master Class in Dissembling.“
- CNN’s Chris Cillizza thinks the winners were Angus King, Tom Cotton, Martin Heinrich, Kamala Harris and Jim Comey. The losers were Sessions’s memory, Jim Risch, and Susan Collins.
- The Arizona Republic: “John McCain sticks to a script with Sessions testimony.” From Dan Nowicki: “Unlike his performance at the June 8 Comey hearing, when his questions came out slow and, in at least one case, garbled, McCain at all times appeared serious and deliberative, never smiling. He sounded a little hoarse and occasionally coughed or cleared his throat. He also appeared to refer closely to written material.”
- The Los Angeles Times: “Sessions said Kamala Harris’ questioning made him ‘nervous.’”
- The Guardian: “’Nervous’ Jeff Sessions’ attempt at Trump-like bravado falls flat.”
- Rolling Stone: “25 Times Jeff Sessions Had a Convenient Memory Lapse While Testifying. ‘I don’t recall’ was the attorney general’s refrain.”
- The Intercept: “Sessions Can’t Remember Anything.”
- Vanity Fair: “Does Jeff Sessions have a memory problem?”
- Huffington Post: “Sessions And The Trump Team Really Don’t Want To Say ‘Executive Privilege.’ The attorney general struggled to articulate a legal basis for dodging questions.”
- Vox: “The real story of Sessions’ testimony is the questions he didn’t answer.”
- The Root: “Senate Intelligence Committee Let Sessions Off the Hook.”
The New York Times’s Frank Bruni, widening the aperture in his column, calls Sessions “a flustered Gump in the headlights”: “The appearance … didn’t bring us much closer to understanding what did or didn’t happen … But as I watched him … I saw a broader story, a dark parable of bets misplaced and souls under siege. This is what happens when you draw too close to Trump. You’re diminished at best, mortified at worst. You’ve either done work dirtier than you meant to or told fibs bigger than you ought to or been sullied by contact or been thrown to the wolves. … For all Trump’s career and all his campaign, he played the part of Midas, claiming that everything he touched turned to gold. That was never true. This is: Almost everyone who touches him is tarnished, whether testifying or not.”
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