Politics

Dem. Rep. Keith Ellison suggests jail time for Jeff Sessions

Keith Ellison Castro Russia jail
Keith Ellison

On Thursday, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should be thrown in jail for failing to mention that he met with the Russian ambassador, the Daily Caller reported.

According to the Daily Caller:

In a statement issued Thursday morning, Ellison asserted that Sessions “lied under oath” in his Jan. 10 Senate confirmation hearing about the meetings with Kremlin’s diplomat, Sergey Kislyak.

“Since it has now come to light that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath about meeting with Russian officials during the campaign, we must be entirely clear on one thing: perjury is a felony and may be punishable by prison for up to five years,” said Ellison.

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Sessions announced Thursday afternoon that he is recusing himself from any Justice Department and FBI investigations involving activities of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, on which the Republican served as an adviser.

The report added:

On Wednesday, it was revealed that last year, when Sessions was still serving as a senator, he had two encounters with Kislyak. One meeting occurred on Sept. 8 in Sessions’ Senate office. The other was on the sidelines of an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in July. Numerous other ambassadors were in attendance.

In his confirmation testimony, Sessions responded to a question from his then-colleague, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, about whether he had any contacts with Russian government officials during the presidential campaign. Franken framed the question by citing a breaking story from CNN that some Trump campaign advisers may have had contacts with Russian operatives.

Sessions said that, as a Trump “surrogate,” he did not have any such contacts.

Democrats are now insisting that Sessions committed perjury, but, California trial attorney Robert Barnes wrote at Law Newz, the AG “absolutely did not perjure himself” during his testimony:

The criminal law only prohibits lying to Congress under two statutes — 18 USC 1621 ands 18 USC 1001. Section 1621 requires a person “willfully and contrary” to a sworn oath “subscribe a material matter” which is both false and the person knows to be false. Section 1001 is basically the same, without certain tribunal prerequisites: it also requires the government prove a person willfully made a materially false statement. This requires three elements: first, a false statement; second, the false statement be “material”; and third, the false statement be made “knowingly” and “willfully.” A statement is not false if it can be interpreted in an innocent manner. A statement is not material if it is not particularly relevant to the subject of the inquiry. Willfully is a very high standard of proof: it requires the person know they are committing the crime, and do so anyway. None of the three exist as to Sessions.

There was strong evidence Hillary Clinton made false statements to Congress about a range of subjects concerning the emails, and evidence she knew they were false. She still was not prosecuted, and Professors like Laurence Tribe recommended her for the Presidency. There was strong evidence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA spying on Americans, and he was not prosecuted, but promoted by President Obama, without complaint from many of these same liberal lawyers, professors and journalists. Yet, these same “lawyers” and “journalists” now attack Sessions for what is manifestly not a criminal act, and for which they never demanded any inquiry of either Clinton or Clapper.

Their only claim against Sessions is that Sessions, while Senator, talked to the Russian ambassador a whopping 2 times in 2016. That’s called doing his job. Senator Franken, during the Attorney General confirmation proceedings, talked about “ties to Russia” and asked if Senator Session had discussed the Trump campaign “with Russian government officials.” Sessions answered he had not. Sessions has no “ties with Russia” and there is no evidence he discussed the Trump campaign with any Russian official. The attempt to conflate Sessions doing his job as a Senator — meeting with ambassadors — as meaning he must have talked about campaign tactics or the campaign at all is patently ludicrous.

But ludicrous has become the standard operating mode for the modern left.

By the way, as we noted here, here and here, Democrats have also met with Russians.  And let’s not forget that Chuck Schumer once consumed a Krispy Kreme doughnut with Vladimir Putin:

Schumer putin russia doughnut

Does that make him a Russian agent?  According to the modern left, yes, it would.  So, where’s the outrage?

There isn’t any, because the real goal is to remove Donald Trump from the White House by any means necessary.  The Daily Caller said that Ellison appears to be the first to mention the prospect of a prison stint.  But it won’t take long for other Democrats to repeat the refrain.

And where are Republicans?  Naturally, they’re in a fetal position somewhere, too scared to fight the left’s attempted coup d’etat.

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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