Defending Jeff Sessions: Democrats need to stop the overreach

My advice to Democrats, regarding their demand for the head of Attorney General Jeff Sessions: turn off MSNBC and CNN, and calmly read the transcripts of the remarks that have been made.

In Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing, former Saturday Night Live comedy star Al Franken referred to scurrilous allegations being peddled around Washington by a former British intelligence operative, about Donald Trump’s alleged “ties” to Russia, including secret meetings between Trump campaign officials and Kremlin emissaries.

{mosads}Senator Franken mentioned alleged meetings and contacts where three Trump campaign staffers were supposed to have travelled to Europe for secret meetings with Putin emissaries. Then he asked Senator Sessions if he was aware of contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians. That is when Sessions volunteered that he had appeared as a campaign surrogate, and hadn’t had meetings with the Russians.

It’s very clear that Sessions was referring to the allegations Franken and others had been making about Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen.

The former British intelligence operative, whose “investigation” was bought and paid for by the Democrat National Committee, claimed that Trump lawyer Cohen had met with Russian agents in Prague. Cohen subsequently presented his passport to his boss to show he had never left the country during that period.

Democrats hate Jeff Sessions because he is tough, he is determined, and he is fair-minded.

They know he will change the way the Department of Justice has done business over the past eight years.

For example, he is likely to reinvigorate DoJ investigations into voter fraud, and to drop politically-motivated investigations launched by his predecessor. Example: just this week, the DoJ dropped its long-standing lawsuit against Texas over its voter ID law.

Attorney General Sessions is also likely to cut off a political slush fund administered by the Department of Justice that funnelled an estimated $3 billion to left-wing activist organizations.

Washington is nothing if it is not about the money, and whose ox gets gored. After taking out LTG Michael Flynn, they smell blood in the waters.

Last week, Democrat activists at CNN made an attempt to smear White House advisor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, creating a story, made up of whole cloth, that somehow Gorka was a closet anti-Semite.

What they really feared, of course, was Dr. Gorka’s outspoken support for defeating radical Islamic terrorism and winning the war of ideas against the ideology motivating the jihadis who want to kill us and destroy our way of life.

When that failed, they looked for fresh meat.

The attack on Attorney General Sessions is the continuation of a Democrat party effort to undermine the Trump administration with allegations of untoward Russian influence.

In addition to the scurrilous dossier from the former MI6 operative, which has been dismissed as total fantasy by the FBI, former Obama administration and Clinton campaign operatives continue to make dark allegations that somehow the Russians “have something” on Donald Trump and could be subjecting him to blackmail.

One player in these sordid efforts at disinformation is former Obama Pentagon official Evelyn Farkas.

Ms. Farkas, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense handling Russia and Ukrainian issues, resigned in September 2015 because she grew frustrated with President Obama’s handling of the Russian annexation of Crimea and its occupation of Eastern Ukraine.

So she joined the Hillary Clinton campaign as an advisor, noting that Mrs. Clinton “got it” on Russia.

(Exactly why anyone thought Mrs. Clinton would get tough on Russia when she approved the sell-off of America’s uranium deposits to Kremlin interests while Secretary of State, then sat back as the beneficiaries of those deals funnelled over $100 million into the Clinton Foundation coffers, continues to baffle me).

Ms. Farkas has appeared repeatedly in media outlets and op-ed pieces, peddling her bill of goods questioning whether Donald Trump has been “compromised” by Russia.

Last month, she called for an independent investigation into Trump administration ties to Russia in mid-February 2017, saying the core question was, “Are you susceptible to blackmail from a foreign entity or individual?”

On Wednesday night, she told MSNBC host Brian Williams that she was part of an effort, described by the New York Times, to “preserve” classified intelligence about the alleged Trump-Russia ties, by making sure it was sent to Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Funny how MSNBC consistently introduces her as a Russia expert and former Pentagon official, but fails to mention that she was a Hillary Clinton campaign advisor.

She launched her Russia smear of Donald Trump in an April 2016 column in Politico, titled: “Trump and Putin: Two Liars Separated at Birth?” Once again, a left-wing media outlet failed to disclose her relationship to the Clinton campaign.

It should be obvious to any disinterested observer that we are witnessing a political witch-hunt, not an actual investigation.,

The Democrats are grasping at straws, and I believe they will soon regret their overreach.

Kenneth R. Timmerman was the 2012 Republican congressional nominee for Maryland’s 8th District and is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, published by Post Hill Press.