Jeff Sessions is an oft-misunderstood man. Time and again, he has found himself the innocent victim of dishonorable accusations that he, a plainly honorable southern gentleman, should never have to suffer. Time and again, he has been afflicted by mysterious memory loss that renders him incapable of recollecting important facts about his own honorable conduct.

Jeff Sessions calls accusations of Russia collusion an 'appalling lie' Read more

Time and again, his many critics fail to understand his selfless commitment to the law, to ethics and to the United States itself.

Anyone watching Sessions testifying before his former Senate colleagues – as he liked to call them, before they hurled all kinds of calumnies in his direction – was surely shocked by how often the attorney general has had to endure such indignities.

Who could expect this fine man to live by the common standards of recusal? It’s quite outrageous to think that recusal from the Russia investigation means he had to recuse himself from firing someone for the Russia investigation.

The normal rules do not apply to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

“It is absurd, frankly, to suggest that a recusal from a single specific investigation would render the attorney general unable to manage the leadership of the various Department of Justice law-enforcement components that conduct thousands of investigations,” Sessions explained to his plainly clueless former colleagues.

So what if one of those investigations included him, his role in the Trump campaign, and his boss, Donald Trump?

“I recuse myself from any investigation into the campaign for president, but I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against false allegations,” he declared.

This isn’t the first time our hero has suffered the slings and arrows of what he called so memorably “an appalling and detestable lie” on Tuesday.

A few decades ago he was denied his rightful appointment as a federal judge because some other former colleagues accused him of racism.

His deputy Thomas Figures testified that Sessions called him “boy” on multiple occasions and warned him to be careful about what he said to white folks. Figures, who is black, also told how Sessions joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana”.

Sessions insisted in his confirmation hearings earlier this year that he was plainly misunderstood as a US attorney in Alabama. “I conducted myself honorably and properly,” he declared. “I did not harbor the kind of animosity and race-based discrimination ideas that I was accused of. I did not.”

Now sometimes you just have to take a gentleman’s word for what happened. Sessions didn’t deny making any of those vile comments, but he did say he’d been quoted out of context.

Which is exactly what our fine, upstanding attorney general was forced to explain all over again on Tuesday. Senator Al Franken had asked what Sessions called “a rambling question after some six hours of testimony” about Trump campaign contacts with Russians.

How could Sessions know that Franken meant “contacts with Russians” when he used those words? Once again, this was plainly a confirmation hearing taken out of context.

“I was responding to the allegation that surrogates had been meeting with Russians on a regular basis,” he said. “It simply did not occur to me to go further than the context and to list any conversations that I may have had with Russians in routine situations, as I had many routine meetings with other foreign officials.”

For normal folks, meeting with people on a regular basis is the same as meeting with people in routine situations. But not for Jeff Sessions.

This isn’t the first time Sessions has struggled to tell his side of the story. Back when people were accusing him of racism in Alabama, he admitted he may have called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race”.

“Trying to recollect on it the best I can recall was, and I say, well, he’s not that popular around town,” Sessions told senators in 1986. “I’ve heard him referred to as a disgrace to his race.”

A month later, he insisted he had never said any such thing. “I am absolutely convinced that I did not call [him] a disgrace to his race, and I did not acknowledge it in any form.”

Why this great man finds himself so often ensnared in such confusion remains a puzzle.

Jeff Sessions on Hawaii gaffe: 'Nobody has a sense of humour any more' Read more

Recently, he told a conservative radio host that it was incredible that some Hawaii judge could overturn his boss’s travel ban on Muslims. “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Sessions said.

That island in the Pacific may be a state with the same statutory and constitutional position as Alabama. But the words of Jeff Sessions were once again being taken out of context.

“Nobody has a sense of humor any more,” he told ABC. “I wasn’t criticizing the judge or the island,” he told CNN. It’s almost like you can’t tell KKK jokes any more. What is this country coming to?

It’s true that Sessions has moments of memory failure, but the good news is that when confronted with reality, he has immense powers of recall. Even though he initially forgot about meeting the Russians a couple of times, when a reporter asked about those meetings, “we immediately recalled the conversation,” he told the senators. “I never intended not to include that.”

As for a third meeting in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, Sessions cleared up the confusion in the same way his boss is draining the swamp. “I would have gladly reported the meeting and encounter that may have occurred, and some say occurred in the Mayflower, if I had remembered it, or it actually occurred, which I don’t remember that it did.”

So that’s straight, then.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator Kamala Harris peppered Sessions with ‘pesky questions’. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Trust Kamala Harris, another Democratic senator with lots of pesky questions, to fail to recognize the deeply honorable nature of our amnesiac attorney general. As she peppered him with questions about whether he communicated with any Russian nationals, Sessions almost let it slip that he might have met a few at the Republican convention. Then he quickly tried to qualify his words to the point of meaninglessness.

“I’m not able to be rushed this fast,” he complained. “It makes me nervous.”

The truth can make you feel nervous. Especially when you’re not the man you think you are, if you actually ever were, which you don’t remember saying you were.