Meeting with a government ambassador in your role as head of the Senate Armed Services committee and claiming you didn't talk about the election is a far cry from meeting with the Attorney General potentially set to potentially prosecute your wife and claiming you only discussed your grandchildren.

The problem here is that there is objectively no difference between the two scenarios you laid out (because there is no evidence either way). It is purely a matter of "optics" in both situations (trust or lack thereof), so your interpretation is wholly dependent on what other news about that particular person you've read.

That's a fair assessment.

It's a good line, but then you read that none of the other members of the Armed Services Committee have confirmed contact with the Russian ambassador. It then reads a bit more like an excuse, albeit possibly an acceptable one.

> The Washington Post contacted all 26 members of the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee to see whether any lawmakers besides Sessions met with Kislyak in 2016. Of the 20 lawmakers who responded, every senator, including Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), said they did not meet with the Russian ambassador last year. The other lawmakers on the panel did not respond as of Wednesday evening.

Is speaking to the Russian ambassador somehow illegal? It seems that the accusations here are whether Sessions had contacts with Russia during his time as a Trump campaign surrogate. He did not. So it's not clear to me what the controversy is here.

Of course speaking to them isn't illegal.

Lying about it during a confirmation hearing? Now that's illegal.

Apparently speaking to any Russian in this political climate is illegal.

At this rate they'll introduce a resolution soon enough that if you have eaten pierogi in the past 10 years you can't hold a public office.

There are plenty of reasons why one would not disclose a meeting on a public record, from even forgetting it happened to the fact that having it in the open might jeopardise negotiations/operations/assets etc.

It's much easier to get things done in many cases when they are shrouded by secrecy while people might not like it but if we need something from the Russians or want to send them a message sometimes it's best not to be done as an official state visit and vise versa.

Every negotiation at some point started as a non-official meeting in the kitchen of some restaurant somewhere or a hotel lobby.