Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by Michael Brendan Doherty, who is a columnist at The Week, and we're going to be talking about the furorary over Jeff Sessions and whether the media has lost its mind over Russia.

So, Michael, Jeff Sessions is under a lot of pressure and may have to stand down, resign as Attorney General, and his career may in fact be ruined as a result of

his meetings with the Russian ambassador in Washington and his later statement during his

confirmation hearing that he did not have communications with Russian officials during the campaign.

Now, Ted Cruz called this story a nothing burger and implied it was just a

suggestion, implied it was just the Democrats trying to sort of assassinate sessions. Would you

agree with that? I rarely agree so heartily with Ted Cruz, but in this case I do. And it may not

but just be the Democrats. It may also be the intelligence community, which seems to have played a

role in the scuttling of General James Mattis from the National Security Advisor spot over a

similar story. So I do think there is potentially the story is that, you know, there are elements

of the executive branch that are taking out Trump's cabinet and advisors one by one.

But beyond that, I do think it's a nothing burger story in the sense that the questions that Senator Sessions was asked at these confirmation hearings, the oral question given by Senator

Franken was clearly the context of as a member of the campaign, did you have an ongoing

series of information sharing with Russian officials? And or did did did people have from the campaign have those and what

would you do if you found out about that as attorney general and Jeff sessions responded that

he didn't know anything about that happening and that he himself was a campaign surrogate, and he had no communications with the Russian government.

And people are taking that last phrase very literally and saying, well, you actually had these two

little chats with the ambassador, but the context was clearly about information sharing to help the campaign, not part of the normal business

of being a high-ranking Senate leader who works on the Armed Services Committee. And it's the same

thing with the written question from Senator Leahy was set in the context of, in the context

...