Sessions Must Resign or Be Impeached 

by Craig Calcaterra
The Washington Post is reporting this evening that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings. When he was asked directly by Senator Al Franken about contacts between officials in the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Sessions explicitly said no, he did not have such meetings or conversations. The Post now reports that Sessions spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador.

While some surrogates of the Trump Administration have suggested that Sessions’ conversations with the Russian ambassador pertained to Senate Armed Services Committee business, all 19 of the 26 other members of the committee the Post has thus far been able to reach have denied that they ever had discussions with the ambassador. If this was Senate business, it was singular and peculiar Senate business indeed with Sessions freelancing in unusual fashion.

While I am certain that Trump and Sessions will try to push back on all of this, at the moment, there is strong reason to believe that Sessions perjured himself before Congress. What’s more, that he perjured himself with respect to a pressing national security matter that his own department is tasked with investigating.

As such, if this report holds up and if there is no compelling explanation for Sessions’ apparently untruthful testimony, one of three things must necessarily happen:

1. Sessions must resign from office; or

2. Congress must impeach Sessions; or

3. We must admit that we are in an intractable Constitutional crisis due to the Congress’ unwillingness to protect and vindicate its own processes and procedures and its failure to serve as a check on the criminal acts of a member of the executive branch.

It must be one of those three things. There are no other options. If neither (1) nor (2) is taken, the Constitution is essentially a dead letter. 

So, Congress: what’s it gonna be?

Craig Calcaterra

Craig is the author of the daily baseball (and other things) newsletter, Cup of Coffee. He writes about other things at Craigcalcaterra.com. He lives in New Albany, Ohio with his wife, two kids, and many cats.