The Attorney General of the United States, ladies and gentlemen
by digby
Wow:
In response to a court order directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to disclose the part of his security clearance form detailing his Russia contacts, the Department of Justice released a mostly blank page of paper.
The Thursday morning “disclosure” comes in response to a lawsuit from an ethics watchdog group.
According to NPR, a “recently-launched ethics watchdog group called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March for sections of the Standard Form 86 [i.e., security clearance] relating to Sessions’ contacts ‘with any official of the Russian government.’” On June 12, a judge ordered the DOJ to comply with the request within 30 days.
As recently as Wednesday, the DOJ said it planned to comply with the court order. But the deadline came and went this week.
On Thursday morning, the DOJ finally made an attempt to comply with the court order by disclosing a single page document that is almost totally redacted. The one exception is a box checked ‘No,’ indicating Sessions has not had contact with a foreign government in the last seven years.
Citing a DOJ spokesman, Natasha Bertrand of Business Insider reports that the former senator from Alabama is intentionally omitting meetings he had with Russian officials, including Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
But it is not clear Sessions was acting in his official capacity when he met with Kislyak during the campaign. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, one of Sessions’ meetings with Kislyak happened at the Republican National Convention — an event Sessions traveled to and from using campaign funds. What’s more, a person who was at the RNC told the Journal that Sessions and Kislyak discussed the Trump campaign.
In the margin of the single-page disclosure released on Thursday, Sessions cites two statutory justifications for not disclosing information about his meetings with Russians. Both of them claim disclosure “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
He isn't the first lying crook to be Attorney General (John Mitchell still wears the crown --- for now.) But he may be the first to be personally involved in a scheme to have a foreign government install a useful tool as president. That probably isn't what happened but he sure is acting like someone with something to hide.
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