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Conservative media rose to the defense of Attorney General Jeff Sessions after a Wednesday report indicating he had had multiple contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign.
A representative Breitbart headline declared, “Fake News: Media, Democrats Distort Remarks to Target Jeff Sessions.” The piece argued that Sessions had not perjured himself during his senate confirmation hearing, pointing out that he had been asked about “repeated contacts between the campaign and representatives of the Russian government” and not about a “chance greeting at a public event, and a Senate meeting in the course of his official duties.” It went on to imply that the Obama administration was involved in an attempt to destroy Sessions, which it described as “a coordinated hit job, including espionage against the Russian ambassador, and possibly against members of the Trump campaign.”
A post on Sean Hannity’s site also worked to rebut allegations of perjury. It concluded, “Of course, the facts of this matter will go largely ignored, abandoned by the opposition media in an effort to smear Attorney General Sessions and push the Russia narrative into several more news cycles.” The Daily Caller, by contrast, took a slightly more moderate approach in “There’s Almost No Chance That Sessions Committed Perjury.” Reviewing the federal perjury statute, legal affairs reporter Kevin Daley wrote, “Sessions’ failure to disclose contacts with Russian officials is disappointing, but doesn’t qualify as perjury within the meaning of federal law.” He argued that we lack “a clear demonstration that Sessions intended to lie to the committee,” assuming he lied at all.
Many publications seized on Sen. Claire McCaskill’s false claim that hadn’t spoken with or met Kislyak. As Breitbart noted in “McCaskill Misleads with Tweet She Had No Contact With Russian Ambassador,” the senator had previously tweeted about meetings with the ambassador in 2013 and 2015.
A few conservative publications did acknowledge that there might be something to the allegations against Sessions. Noting that Republicans in power “aren’t rushing to [Sessions’] defense,” Heat Street wrote, “The implication seems to be that no contact with Russia, however casual, can truly ever be innocent in the age of Trump, and Republicans want no part of campaign-era players whose actions feed into the narrative that Trump’s Presidency was orchestrated by outside forces.” (Some publications suggested that Republicans who had turned against Sessions were disloyal, as did LifeZette in an article that those Republicans “quick to give in to the media narrative.”)
National Review, meanwhile, refused to condemn the attorney general, even in “Sessions Should Recuse Himself From Any Investigation Into Russian Interference.” That article that described the attorney general as “a man of deep integrity” and “no fool.” If, as the title proposed, he should recuse himself, it’s primarily because “the optics are bad” at a time when “Sessions has bigger, more important briefs on his own desk.”
Posts about the Sessions affair were widely shared from conservative Facebook pages:
