Democrats would very much like you to believe that Attorney General Jeff Sessions committed perjury or was covering something up when he said at his confirmation hearing that he hadn't spoken with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign. But that requires Sessions knowingly saying something false or misleading; if he simply forgot, it doesn't qualify as perjury.
And Democrats are doing a lot of forgetting themselves of late about their own interactions with the Russians.
First there was Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who tweeted Thursday that she had never met with the Russian ambassador. Except she had. She would later explain that she only meant in the context of her service on the Armed Services Committee, which is how Sessions justified one of his meetings with Sergey Kislyak.
Then, on Friday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) added her own unhelpful contradiction. She told Politico that she had never met with Kislyak, only to have Politico produce a 2010 photo of Pelosi sitting across the table from Kislyak at a meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Pelosi's office also had an explanation: That she meant a one-on-one meeting. “Of course that's what she meant,” spokesman Drew Hammill said. “She has never had a private one-on-one with him.”
There a couple major differences between the Sessions situation and both the McCaskill and Pelosi situations, of course. One is the fact that Sessions was under oath, so there was much more of an onus on him to speak factually given that he was under consideration for attorney general and could face jail time for lying. The second is that there is a major investigation into Russia's hacking and the 2016 election that Sessions's comments play into -- again, completely incomparable stakes.
But Sessions's excuse is very similar to the ones offered by McCaskill and Pelosi. He said that he didn't think to mention his meetings with Kislyak because they weren't in the context of the campaign — just like McCaskill's defense that she was talking about meeting Kislyak in the context of the Armed Services Committee and Pelosi's that she was only talking about one-on-one meetings.
Yet none of them made that qualifier clear.
Here's Sessions: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and, and I didn't have — did not have communications with the Russians.”
Here's McCaskill: “I've been on the Armed Services Com for 10 years. No call or meeting w/ Russian ambassador. Ever. Ambassadors call members of Foreign Rel Com.” (McCaskill got three Pinocchios for this claim.)
And here's the exchange with Pelosi:
POLITICO: You’ve been in Congress a little bit, and you’re in leadership. Have you ever met with the Russian ambassador?PELOSI: Not with this Russian ambassador, no.
If you're a Democrat looking at McCaskill's and Pelosi's defenses, they probably seem legit. That's because you are predisposed to believing they are honest, good people. And if you're a Republican looking at Sessions's defense, you probably think the same.
But none of the three made their meanings very clear. All three denied contact without being absolutely clear that there might have been other contacts that could make their statements appear false.
Sessions, again, is the only one who was under oath, and that's a key distinction. But if you're looking for evidence that an accomplished politician like him can simply mess up and not be as clear as he should have been about whether he met with Kislyak, McCaskill and Pelosi gift-wrapped it for him.