RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants to fill the most senior posts at the Defense Department with people sympathetic to Islamists, or almost as bad, people sympathetic to Barack Obama.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants to tap the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, as his undersecretary of defense for policy, but the Pentagon chief is running into resistance from White House officials, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government. She came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it—and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now.

For Mattis’s part, he has “put her name forward and he doesn’t quite understand why people have an objection,” the person said.

How can he not understand? She was an enabler of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s a radical Islamist group. And in her incompetence, the embassy she ran played a prelude role to the carnage in Benghazi.

Transition officials swatted down Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration and who was Mattis’s top choice to be his deputy; she eventually took herself out of the running for the position.

Why would he pick someone close to Obama for such a crucial role? It’s totally inconceivable.

Apperently, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants people sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and whatever brotherhood Barack Obama belongs to at the most senior levels of government. If these people reflect Mattis’s philosophy, we have the wrong man at the Defense Department. Mattis is also opposed to waterboarding terrorists and enhanced interrogation techniques.

Can somebody in the comments section please explain to me why Donald Trump picked this bozo for Secretary of Defense?

There is a lot of parsing of Jeff Session’s answer to Al Franken at his confirmation hearings. Here’s my contribution.

First, this is the exchange:

FRANKEN: OK. CNN has just published a story and I’m telling you this about a news story that’s just been published. I’m not expecting you to know whether or not it’s true or not. But CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that quote, “Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” These documents also allegedly say quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have – did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.

What I find remarkable is that Franken didn’t ask Sessions about any contacts he himself might have had with the Russians. He asked him what he would do if Trump officials had such contacts. So, Sessions wasn’t being pressed about his own contacts and deny having any, he volunteered that he didn’t “have communications with the Russians.” If Sessions was deliberately lying here, he went out of his way to lie under oath for no discernible reason. Who does that? Especially if, assuming for the sake of argument that Sessions had a cognizance of guilt, there were about a thousand different ways to dance around Franken’s question without creating this vulnerability.

There is also the phrase Sessions used, “communications with the Russians,” which it seems is pretty clearly meant to denote the sort of nefarious coordination that Franken is getting out. All of this suggests that the most reasonable reading is that Sessions wasn’t thinking of his two contacts with the Russian ambassador — one of which was very informal in a large group — in this context. (I’m not an expert on Russian intelligence operations, but it is hard to believe that the Kremlin sends its ambassador to the U.S. to brief U.S. senators about them and coordinate how to carry them out.)

The Sessions answers have created a big political headache for him and obviously he should have been more careful. But like so much else since the election, the hysteria doesn’t come close to matching the underlying facts.

On the overwrought, partisan allegations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions committed perjury in his confirmation-hearing testimony, let’s cut to the chase: There is a good deal of political hay to be made because Sessions made a statement that was inaccurate — or at least incomplete — especially when mined out of its context. But the claim that his testimony was perjurious as a matter of law is wholly without merit.

Perjury is not inaccuracy. It must be willfully false testimony. Willfulness is the criminal law’s most demanding mens rea (state of mind) requirement. Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the speaker knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally — not by accident, misunderstanding, or confusion — said something that was untrue, with a specific purpose to disobey or disregard the law. Therefore, when there is an allegation of perjury, the alleged false statements must be considered in context. Any ambiguity is construed in favor of innocence. If there is potential misunderstanding, the lack of clarity is deemed the fault of the questioner, not the accused.

We will turn momentarily to the transcript of the exchange between Sessions and Senator Al Franken (D., Minn.). First, let’s highlight the inaccuracy in the testimony. Sessions stated that he did not have “communications with the Russians.” It is now known that there were at least two occasions during the 2016 campaign on which Sessions, then a senator and a member of the chamber’s Armed Services Committee, had contact with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

One of these occasions is easily dismissed: Apparently, Sessions saw Kislyak, in addition to dozens of other ambassadors, at a Heritage Foundation reception during the Republican convention. As Sessions was leaving the podium, a smaller group of these diplomats, including Kislyak, approached Sessions to chat briefly — mainly to compliment him on his remarks. Even the Washington Post doesn’t think much of this chance meeting (buried deep in its story) other than the fact that it happened.

A second meeting occurred in September in Sessions’s Senate office. The Post dramatically claims that this meeting occurred “at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.” That is a curious description. The report by intelligence officials claimed that the Russian cyber effort targeted both major parties, not just Democrats. Moreover, the successful hacking of Democratic e-mail accounts had already occurred by September. There is not a shred of evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign was in any way complicit in the hacking, much less that the hacking affected the outcome of the election. To the unknowable but probably inconsequential extent that the Trump campaign may have benefited from disclosure of John Podesta’s e-mails, there is nothing criminal about that — no more than there is anything criminal in the fact that the much of the American media skew their coverage in favor of Democrats.

The story about the connection between Russia and the Donald Trump presidential campaign is either the most elaborate cover-up of all time, or the dumbest. More evidence for the dumb theory arrives with the news that during his confirmation hearings Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t tell Senators about two 2016 meetings with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

The Washington Post reported late Wednesday that Mr. Sessions had two conversations with Sergei Kislyak last year, one a brief chat amid a gaggle of other ambassadors at a public event at the GOP convention in July, another in September at the then-Senator’s office.

Yet at his Jan. 10 confirmation hearing, Democrat Al Franken asked Mr. Sessions what he would do if he learned that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian government. “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Mr. Sessions replied, adding that “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

In a written question, Democrat Pat Leahy asked, “Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Mr. Sessions replied: “No.”

Democrats are calling this perjury and demanding that Mr. Sessions resign, but his only certain offense is ineptitude. A spokesman for Mr. Sessions late Wednesday defended the AG by saying, “He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign—not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.”

Mr. Sessions added at a press conference Thursday that he would recuse himself from any FBI investigation of the Trump campaign or Russian interference in 2016, adding that his answers in the Senate were “honest and correct as I understood the questions at the time.”

This may be technically true, but it won’t wash politically amid a Beltway feeding frenzy. Mr. Sessions knew Democrats were hunting for any Russian-Trump campaign ties, and meeting with the Russian ambassador is no offense for a Senator or campaign adviser. So why not admit the meetings up front? Give Democrats and the media nowhere to go.

If Mr. Sessions was trying to cover up some dark Russian secret, he’s the Jim Carrey of cover-up artists. Surely he knew someone would discover a meeting in his Senate office, which isn’t exactly a drop-site in the Virginia suburbs, and the meeting in Cleveland had multiple witnesses. Like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn not telling Vice President Mike Pence about his meeting with the ambassador, this is a case of dumb and dumber.

The most important fact so far about the larger Trump-Russia collusion story is that there are so few salient facts. The Russian hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta were embarrassing but had little bearing on the election. The dossier of supposed contacts between Trumpians and Russians published by BuzzFeed has never been corroborated.

Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the ties have reported nothing of substance. What we have on the evidence so far is a hapless cover-up without an underlying scandal.

Meanwhile, news emerged Thursday that Obama Administration officials ran a government intel operation on the Trump campaign. The New York Times reports that political appointees signed off on surveillance of “associates” of the Trump campaign, though “the nature of these contacts remains unknown.” The officials then spread this raw intelligence throughout the government and to foreign counterparts, ensuring they’d be widely read and supposedly to prevent their Trump successors from covering up the truth.