The Game Is Afoot

The old saw - "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" - is only partly true, as Josh Marshall notes. What the cover-up shows is the presence of a crime, or at least guilty as hell behavior.  Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's behavior stinks of a cover-up.  Why did he lie about meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak?  If he made an honest mistake, because he - apparently - meets with ambassadors all the time, then why didn't Flynn's troubles with meeting Kislyak trigger a memory and lead Sessions to revise his testimony?

There is the obvious hypocrisy factor about Sessions being a vigorous proponent of removing Bill Clinton from office for perjury.  Clinton's lies were obviously categorically different, which is why few people outside of the hard right were eager to pursue the impeachment.  Lying about blow jobs is simply not the same as lying about meeting the Russian ambassador within the context of a tremendous amount scrutiny over the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. The whole reason Sessions was asked the question is because there are legitimate questions about those connections.  Sessions either knew such questions existed or he is too stupid to be attorney general.

The single greatest worry I've had in the first few months of Trumpistan is whether the Congress would do reasonable oversight.  Currently, some GOP leaders are edging towards asking Sessions to recuse himself, whereas others are outright excusing the behavior.  Simply put, the GOP Congress is entirely in the fucking bag for Trump right now, because they are tied to him with chains.  Ironically, their best hope is to launch a sustained and vigorous investigation now and hope they resolve it before the midterms. The longer this drags out, the more it creeps into their own re-election plans.

So far, only Lindsey Graham is covering himself in any laurels here, in that he is the only one among the GOP calling for a special prosecutor.  I have very little confidence in the ability of the GOP Congress to appoint an impartial, competent special prosecutor, but as Dan Rather wrote this morning, there is only so far that the press can go with leaks.  At some point, you need subpoena power.

Trump picked fights with the intelligence community and the press: the group that knows where the bodies are buried and the group with all the good shovels.  The longer this goes, the worse it will get for him.