The #SessionsHearing: Honesty Costs Extra
It’s been a while since I got up before dawn to hunker down in front of my laptop and TV to watch a Senate hearing. It turns out it’s kind of like crankily riding a bicycle.
The first thing you should know about today’s hearing is that I was not planning to live-tweet it. I was going to watch, judge Sessions mercilessly and then write everything up later.
Watching Jeff Sessions “testify” in front of the Senate Judiciary committee this morning was disturbing bordering on the surreal but it wasn’t even a little bit surprising. I was expecting Jeff Sessions to lie. I was expecting him to obfuscate. I was expecting him to hem and haw and shrug and pretend to not know anything about any of the issues currently facing the administration or that have been in the news. He has a history of these things and today was no exception.
Still there were two new questions to Jeff Sessions’ testimony that somehow I wasn’t quite prepared to encounter:
Do You Even Law, Bro?
Most of the questions AG Sessions was asked this morning were met with “I don’t knows” or answers that were so wrong you could practically hear the committee members rolling their eyes — or, as it happens, accidentally dumping sodas on each other. Even when he was read actual legal statutes he’d argue that “I don’t think that’s how the law goes.”
I don’t for a second actually believe that Sessions doesn’t know or understand the law. So that leaves…
Do You Even Care, Bro?
Short answer? Probably not. The smugness that AG Sessions was oozing as he claimed not to know and his faux outrage at Senators demanding an explanation for refusing to answer questions or confronting him with previous lies was sickening.
And why would he care about lying to Congress? Sure it’s a felony and carries a pretty hefty punishment if it gets prosecuted. But guess what: Sessions isn’t going to be prosecuted for lying to Congress. Even if he weren’t the AG, he wouldn’t be prosecuted by this administration because he’s a Trump Super-Toadie and was insisting that part of his job was to protect and serve Trump. Not the administration, Trump.
TL;DR: Our AG happily lied to Congress again today and not one damn thing is going to be done about it.
Here’s the Storify of today’s tweets!
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to help support my work, here’s a handy link!
