Friday, March 3, 2017

He Won’t Go

When you have Richard W. Painter, the former ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush administration — the same people who outed Valerie Plame and the Justice Department’s purge of attorneys who didn’t toe the proper political line — telling the current administration that their Attorney General needs to vacate the premises, well…

No one has any delusions that the Trump administration will actually own up to Mr. Sessions’ lies of omission — and straight-up lies — to the Senate committee that confirmed him, and the Republicans are well-versed enough in IOKIYAR to brush off the facts as we now know them.  We also know that if Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, the attorneys general under President Obama, had “liked” a comment by a Russian official on Facebook they would have faced years of hearings and banshee-level screeches for their impeachment.  That’s to be expected.  No one has such low standards for their own conduct and such high standards for everyone else as the Republican party.

So while Mr. Painter may have been the only lawyer in the Bush administration with a functioning and calibrated moral compass, I would be very surprised if Mr. Sessions didn’t serve out his term in office and even get awarded some gaudy medal of honor by the GOP for standing up to the accusations of lying and contempt of Congress no matter how truthful they are.