Had Sessions’s response to Franken contained the same qualifications as his statement Wednesday night, the next questions would have been about the circumstances in which Sessions met with Russian officials, and the content of those discussions. If he had said that he had met with the Russian ambassador as a senator but not as a campaign surrogate, or that he met with the Russian ambassador but did not discuss campaign issues with him, it would have provoked further controversy regarding a negative story the Trump administration was desperate to tamp down: The extent of the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government. Sessions’s blanket denial put an end to that line of questioning––a denial that was freely offered by Sessions himself, not directly in response to Franken’s query.

There’s no evidence that Sessions’s communications with Kislyak were anything but benign. Neither is there any indication that Sessions knew anything about what American intelligence agencies have said was a deliberate effort to swing the election to Trump by hacking and disclosing embarrassing information about Democrats. But there is also no question that by January, his contact with Kislyak had become a politically inconvenient fact to publicly acknowledge.

Flores has said that he “met with the ambassador in an official capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is entirely consistent with his testimony.” But his answer to Franken offered no such explicit qualification. On the other hand, perjury is notoriously hard to prove, because it requires the subject to have knowingly misled Congress, not to have answered incorrectly as a matter of confusion, misunderstanding, or error. Sessions claims that he was speaking only about contacts he might have had as a Trump surrogate; omitting to mention other contacts likely wouldn't qualify as perjury under the law, even if it amounts to misleading the Senate about his actions.

Had Sessions qualified his statement at the time in the same manner that he has since the Post story appeared, by saying that he did not have communications with the Russians “as a Trump campaign surrogate,” the same questions being asked now would have been raised then. But by not disclosing the contacts in January and answering those questions in his hearing, he has shifted the focus from the nature of the conversations themselves, to questions about his honesty and ability to administer justice impartially.

Even before the latest disclosures, two dozen nonprofits, as well as all the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had called on Sessions to recuse himself, arguing that his role as a key Trump campaign adviser required that step under a plain reading of Justice Department guidelines. That was before Sessions’s communications with Kislyak were publicly known, but Sessions himself already knew of them and still did not recuse himself.