Hannity: Alt-left media going all-in on Russia conspiracy
Democrats once again launching smear campaign to try to damage key Trump administration official
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has responded to a political hit piece from The Washington Post and a subsequent onslaught from Democrats over the fake news that he met with Russians before President Trump took office. He’ll recuse himself from any related investigations.
This should put an end to the phony story ginned up by the radical, alt-left media. After all, Sessions never lied, never misled lawmakers and was going his job when, as senator from Alabama, he met with a foreign ambassador. He’ll play no role in whatever unnecessary investigation ensues, and therefore, there will be no conflict.
“Let me be clear,” Sessions said Thursday. “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign. And the idea that I was part of a, quote, ‘continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,’ is totally false.”
Still, Sessions, who has built a reputation as a straight shooter, said he asked his staff for a recommendation and was told that, since he was an early supporter of Trump and an informal adviser during the campaign, he should recuse himself. He said the decision was reached over a matter of weeks and was not a reaction to a Washington Post story that claimed he met with the Russian ambassador twice and then lied to Congress about it during his confirmation hearings.
As a senator, Jeff Sessions was a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was not out of the ordinary that he talked to foreign ambassadors, and in fact, he spoke to dozens of them last year alone. He was doing his job.
The notion that the alt-radical left is pushing, that Sessions committed perjury during his confirmation hearing, is ridiculous. Here’s the Jan. 10 exchange he had with Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who you may remember as Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley.
“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 claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump,’" Senator Smalley said. “These documents also allegedly stated, quote, ‘There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.’
“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 do you?” Smalley pressed.
Sessions replied that he was unaware of such activity.
“I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians,” Sessions said. “And I'm unable to comment on it.”
It was clear to anyone with a double-digit IQ that Sessions was responding to the "breaking news" Franken sited, which, by the way, turned out to not be true. Yet, Democrats are hyperventilating over the fact that Sessions - as a senator - met with the Russian ambassador and did not disclose it when he was asked about meetings in a completely different context.
These are the same Democrats who saw nothing wrong with President Obama’s attorney general meeting secretly with Bill Clinton n a plane on a tarmac for over 30 minutes while Hillary Clinton was under investigation by the FBI. Loretta Lynch never recused herself from that investigation.
But unlike Lynch, Sessions clearly wanted to reassure the American people that all Russia investigations will be free of any political interference.
This whole smear campaign is really just part of the Democrats' larger fake news conspiracy theory that Russian hacking is the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election, and that somehow, members of the Trump campaign secretly coordinated the whole thing. They've been pushing this ever since President Trump won.
Too bad that back in January, James Clapper, President Obama's own director of national intelligence, said Russian interference did not impact vote tallies. And just yesterday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said there's zero evidence the Trump campaign ever coordinated with Russia.
“We have seen no evidence, been presented with no evidence that anybody on the Trump campaign or an American was involved in colluding with the Russians,” Ryan said.
Need more proof? The House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Sessions meeting with an ambassador in his capacity as senator is not only not unusual, it’s his job.
“We've got to be very careful here,” Nunes said. “It's a slippery slope. All the countries in the world, basically, have embassies here. A lot of these countries are adversaries, but we all meet with those. Many senators and congressmen meet with those ambassadors on a regular basis.”
If there's anything that shows that Russia and people from the Trump campaign somehow conspired and impacted votes in the election, we’ll report it. But the alt-left propaganda media and the Democrats have for months been going ballistic over Russian election influence without any evidence.
They had nothing to say when President Obama meddled in the Israeli election to try to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A 2014 congressional investigation found an Israeli political group used $300,000 of U.S. State Department grant money -- your tax dollars -- to create a political apparatus to defeat the Israeli prime minister. Where was the outrage about influencing elections then? Where was the wall-to-wall news coverage? Where was the hyperventilating and mass hysteria?
They didn't care because it was their guy, their ideological soulmate, who was doing it from the White House.
Adapted from Sean Hannity's monologue on "Hannity," March 2, 2017
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