What the commentators said

Sessions is “the victim of the type of Mccarthyite character assassination the Left used to condemn”, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. The suggestion that he “was colluding with the Russians and tried to cover it up is preposterous”. He was asked at his confirmation hearing whether he was part of a “continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government”, and in that context, denied meeting any Russians. He, like many Democratic lawmakers, met the ambassador in his official capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The attorney general will probably cling on to his job, said Edward Luce in the FT. He may have misled the Senate, but proving he intentionally lied will be very hard. Even so, Trump “is never likely to emerge from the Russian shadow”. Washington “will be progressively enveloped by multiple probes into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia”. Rightly so, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. Trump claims that he has “nothing to do with Russia”, while his son Donald Jr has said that “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia”. There was supposedly “no communication” between Trump’s team and Moscow – except that involving “Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others”.

So far, Trump has found “that he can say virtually anything, however false, without suffering any political consequences”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. He can “insult a political opponent’s wife, make bogus accusations of widespread voter fraud, say Obama founded Isis”, and his supporters only seem to like him more. But in his tweets last weekend, calling Obama a “bad (or sick) guy”, he may have gone too far. He seems to be referring to reports that a court order was granted in October to monitor links between two Russian banks and a Trump server, following intelligence that Kremlin money was going into his campaign. The existence of this order is as yet unconfirmed. And even if it is, it was not a wiretap, and Obama had nothing to do with it. Even for Trump, this could turn out to be a “conspiracy theory too far”.