But Attorney General Jeff Sessions is giving his fellow southerner a run for the money.
Clinton, for those who don’t recall, pioneered several atom-splitting semantic distinctions during his concupiscence controversies. In one diverting moment, he tried to preserve some wiggle room by noting that “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
But Clinton merely tried to split a (seemingly) simple verb into two possibilities.
Sessions has done him one better, splitting himself into several different personas. There’s former senator Jeff Sessions, mild-mannered man about Washington. And then there’s Donald Trump supporter and surrogate Jeff Sessions. And never the twain shall meet, apparently. Not when it comes to parleying with Russian apparatchiks, anyway. Or to put it another way: Just because then-Senator Jeff Sessions met with a prominent Russian official, it doesn’t mean that Trump surrogate Jeff Sessions also attended the meeting.
This tricky alt-persona dualism came to light as the result of an apparent disparity between what Sessions said in his confirmation testimony and evidence that came out this week. During those hearings, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, asked Sessions what he would do if he were confirmed as attorney general and later learned that there had been communications between those associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions replied. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
Unless one means Russians like Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to (and possible spy on) the United States. As The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, Sessions actually talked with Kislyak twice during the campaign. One conversation occurred at a Heritage Foundation event during the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, in July. The second was a formal meeting in Sessions’ Senate office in September.
Time was, that would have seemed like quite the glaring contradiction between testimony and truth. But that’s where Sessions’ ingenious Sybil defense comes in.
“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,” spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores explained to the Post.
As for Sessions himself, on Thursday he was on stage in a third role: The courtly former country boy so taken aback by Franken’s question that it never occurred to him to mention his conversations with the Russian ambassador. He was, you see, focused on the idea of Trump surrogates “meeting continuously” with Russian officials — Franken had mentioned a “continuing exchange of information” — and not someone like him meeting with someone like Kislyak. Even though he was a prominent Trump campaign surrogate and Kislyak is a Russian official.
Still, in the end, the various Jeff Sessionses did the right thing by announcing they were recusing themselves from anything having to do with investigations of possible Trump campaign connections to Russia.
Or half of the right thing, anyway. The Jeff Sessions who is currently the attorney general should now appoint a special prosecutor to look into the entire tangled affair.
Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.