It certainly took new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions a while to figure out that, as a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, he had no business being connected to his agency’s investigation into what role the Russians played in trying to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Sessions recused himself Thursday from being involved in any current or future probe into the matter, but it took unmasking his own duplicity about contact with the Russians to force his hand.
Maybe that will be enough to get Sessions, the former U.S. senator from Alabama, off the hot seat. It all depends on whether he is now telling the truth when he says his two conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year had nothing to do with the Trump campaign — and that’s why he failed to acknowledge them before and during his Senate confirmation hearing in January.
What it won’t stop, though, is the needed digging — by the press, by the FBI and its Justice Department overseer, and by Congress — into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, whose hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager undeniably aided Trump’s effort to upset the Democratic nominee.
The Republican president can call it a “witch hunt” if he wants, but there was a suspicious amount of contact between Trump aides and future Cabinet members with Russian officials both during the campaign and during the transition, when the dots were being connected by U.S. intelligence agencies on the Russian hacking. And who can forget Trump’s initial off-the-cuff endorsement of the hacking?
If the Trump campaign colluded with an adversarial foreign power to steal the Democrats’ internal communications, and if Trump directed it or was aware of it, it rises to the level of an impeachable offense. That’s why this investigation is important and why it needs to be pursued free of interference. If the Justice Department can’t do this even at an arm’s length from Sessions, then either he needs to go or the probe needs to be directed by a special prosecutor.
