Several people have pointed out about my post from yesterday that, beside the accusations that were made against Sessions during his confirmation hearing in 1986 and used again to disqualify him this year, there were many other reasons to oppose him. I have no doubt that many reasonable arguments can be made against Sessions, some of which I agree with and many I don’t, but this isn’t what I was criticizing in my post. I was criticizing people, such as Elizabeth Warren and many journalists in prestigious newspapers, who lie and/or omit crucial information to smear Sessions with baseless accusations. If people think Sessions should not have become Attorney General, they should state their reasons and debate the matter honestly. But even if Sessions were as bad as they think, that doesn’t make it okay to lie and/or omit crucial information to make him look bad.Someone also pointed out to me that, at the trial in the Perry County voting fraud case, the 6 witnesses who maintained their testimony were all from the same family, as this article in the New York Times but not the article on Breitbart I mentioned in my post reports. He is right and this omission is definitely not innocent, so I thought I should point that out, since I’m precisely criticizing other journalists for omitting relevant information. It shows that Breitbart is sometimes misleading, which I don’t think will surprise anyone. (For what it’s worth, I actually checked several claims in that article for accuracy, which is how I ended up reading some parts of the 1986 hearing transcript. Speaking of which, I realized that I had forgotten to link to the transcript in my post yesterday, so I edited it to include the link.) Having said that, the article on Breitbart is still by far the best thing I have read on the accusations against Sessions, even taking into account this omission. (Another good thing, especially on the role of Biden and Kennedy, is this piece in the Washington Examiner.)
The article in the New York Times, on the other hand, is a pretty good example of the kind of shoddy journalism I was criticizing. First, it omits a lot of relevant facts, but only when mentioning them would have played in favor of Sessions. For instance, there is no mention of the fact that the district attorney in Perry County had already requested that Sessions look into this back in 1982, which he refused to do. This is relevant because it could explain why he decided to investigate in 1984 when similar allegations were made again. It also doesn’t say that, although only 6 witnesses maintained that their absentee ballots had been altered, some witnesses changed their testimony during the investigation, nor that one of the defendants was accused of intimidating witnesses. Yet this could explain why only 6 people maintained that their ballot had been altered. Again, this is clearly relevant and weakens the accusation against Sessions, but it was conveniently left out.
Finally, while the author of that article has clearly spoken to several people who were involved in the defense in that case, including Evelyn Turner, who was one of the defendants, there is no indication that she talked to anyone on the other side. In particular, there is no indication that she talked to anyone in Sessions’s office at the time or that she even tried, nor is there any sign that she tried to talk with one of the people who maintained at the trial that their absentee ballots had been altered or even some who initially did but later changed their testimony. I can’t think of any legitimate reasons for a journalist not to do that and, if she did but couldn’t reach any (perhaps because they were dead), I don’t see why she didn’t say so. This isn’t the kind of thing a diligent journalist does, it’s the kind of thing someone who is writing a hit piece does.