Just because Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the middle of a presidential campaign in which Russia was believed to be meddling and then said under oath he had never met with any Russians during the campaign - that was no reason for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to do any hard digging into what the heck happened at that meeting or what Sessions know about Russia's activities at the time!
In his interview Thursday night with Sessions, Carlson was no Hannity-type suck up but his sandbag/hostile cross-examination style so readily deployed with liberals was nowhere in sight. The result was that Sessions gave parsed, self-serving answers that did little to shed light on what any legitimate news organization would consider a very serious threat to our democracy.
Here was the exchange about Sessions’ meeting in his office with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak:
CARLSON: What was the nature of your conversations? You had said earlier that they did not pertain to the campaign. And yet there was an indication today from an administration official that there was conversation about the campaign, if you could clarify.
SESSIONS: I don’t know what that would be referring to but I would just say that we had a conversation, that he came in, and we talked about a number of issues. One of ‘em was the Ukraine and we had a disagreement over that. The Ukrainian ambassador had been into my office for a meeting the day before and so we had a little disagreement over the Ukrainian issue. And so, we had a number of discussions like that, Tucker, but I don’t recall any discussion on the campaign in any significant way. It was in no way some sort of coordinating of an effort or doing anything improper and I don’t believe anybody that was in that meeting would have seen or believed I said one thing that was improper or unwise.
So what were the other subjects in the “number of issues” discussed besides Ukraine? And when Sessions said he didn’t recall the campaign being discussed “in any significant way,” what did he mean? In what “insignificant” way might the campaign have been discussed? Carlson never asked.
Yet as The New York Times timeline shows, that meeting, which took place on September 8, 2016, was in the middle of an uproar about Russia’s alleged hacking into the Democratic National Committee and just three days after President Obama met with President Putin in China and told him to “cut it out.” So if Sessions, who was allegedly acting in his role as a U.S. Senator and not as a Trump campaign operative, didn’t discuss the hacking, why not? Carlson didn't ask.
Later, Carlson asked what kind of conversations Sessions had had during the campaign about Russia’s involvement. Oddly, Sessions answered a question Carlson didn’t ask.
CARLSON: Now, you were a foreign policy advisor [during the campaign], in fact you were the chairman, I think, of the foreign policy advisors to now-President Trump. In that capacity, do you remember conversations that you had as a campaign about Russia and was there any – did you have any belief that they were putting their thumb on the scale, rooting for President Trump over Hillary Clinton? What were your conversations about Russia?
SESSIONS: I never had any conversations about – with the Russians about this campaign and putting – them assisting in the campaign or anything like that. I went out and spoke and I campaigned for Trump but I was not involved in anything like that, you can be sure.
Carlson kinda, sorta followed up, though he never noted how Sessions had avoided the question.
CARLSON: But did the campaign – I guess my question is, did the campaign believe that the Russian government, the Putin government, favored Trump over Clinton?
SESSIONS: I have never been told that. I’ve never been told that.
CARLSON: Do you think they did?
SESSIONS: I don’t have any idea, Tucker. You’d have to ask them.
Well, you’d think as head of the foreign policy advisors, the one to ask would be Sessions.
But Carlson just said, “Right.”
Watch it below, from the March 2, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
You don’t get a DOOVER when you get caught perjuring yourself- what you get is JAIL
Trump and his cronies are a nest of commie pinkos – PINK RIGHT DOWN TO THEIR UNDERWEAR !!!!
SEND THESES TRAITORS TO JAIL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(shivers)