For all his blunders, Jared Kushner has made one invaluable contribution to the Donald Trump administration: he inspired its go-to defense in the face of collusion charges. Over the summer, Kushner explained to congressional investigators that the Trump campaign was so chaotic, so disorganized, and so underprepared that a meeting between campaign aides—himself included—and individuals with Russian ties didn’t even register. “It was typical for me to receive 200 or more e-mails a day during the campaign. I did not have the time to read every one, especially long e-mails from unknown senders or e-mail chains to which I was added at some later point in the exchange,” Kushner said, claiming that he did not read an e-mail outlining the Russian effort to bolster Trump’s candidacy.

Thus was born the Trump campaign’s chaos defense, which other aides have subsequently employed to brush off their own suspicious contacts—or, in the case of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, memory lapses. On Tuesday, faced with a slate of questions from the House Judiciary Committee prompted by a series of fresh revelations from George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, the attorney general suggested to the panel that his murky recollection of events that transpired during last year’s election was the result of the sheer incompetence and dysfunction that plagued Trump’s bid for the White House.

“It was a brilliant campaign, I think, in many ways. But it was a form of chaos every day from day one,” Sessions told the committee in his opening statement on Tuesday. “We traveled sometimes to several places in one day, sleep was in short supply, and I was still a full-time senator with a very full schedule.” The foreign policy committee on which Papadopoulos and Page both served, he said, was similarly slapdash. “I was asked to . . . find some people who would join and meet with Mr. Trump to give him advice and support him regarding foreign policy, although we were not a very effective group,” he said.

In recent weeks, Sessions has come under fire for previous statements he made to congressional investigators. The former Alabama senator told Minnesota Senator Al Franken during a hearing last month that he was not aware of any such contacts during last year’s campaign: “I did not, and I’m not aware of anyone else that did, and I don’t believe it happened,” he said. But his statement was thrown into doubt by Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, which revealed that he had offered to arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a March 2016 meeting led by Sessions. (After Papadopoulos’s testimony was unsealed, Sessions claimed to recall the interaction, and he told the House panel on Tuesday that he “pushed back” on the idea.) Similarly, Page testified to Congress earlier this month that he had informed the attorney general of a multi-day trip he took to Russia last year; on Tuesday, Sessions said that he does not remember the encounter with Page.

Before Sessions, Donald Trump Jr. adopted the chaos defense after it was revealed that he met with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016 on the supposition that he would walk away with damning intel on Hillary Clinton. “I had never worked on a campaign before and it was an exhausting, all-encompassing, life-changing experience. Every single day I fielded dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails and phone calls,” the president’s eldest son wrote in a statement. And in a recent interview with The New York Times, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon also argued that the Trump campaign’s ineptitude would have prevented any sort of substantive collusion with the Russian government. “I think the collusion thing—and I have said this from day one—is a joke,” the Breitbart News chief told the outlet. “I was there . . . we had a tough time colluding between the Trump campaign and Pennsylvania and the R.N.C.”