First, the cold water: Jeff Sessions isn’t going anywhere. He is no Alberto Gonzales.

Second, more cold water: Sessions had no major stumbles before the U.S. Senate, where he testified in front of the Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. Third: Sessions still sustained some damage. Working for Donald Trump requires that you defend what no one should have to defend, and that you negotiate dilemmas that no one should have to negotiate. Russia isn’t Sessions’s problem. Trump is. And the case of James Comey is merely one of what are likely to be numerous headaches for an attorney general who must balance the ethics of his job with the threat of getting fired for telling his boss no.

But let’s first examine the Russia-related segment. On this, Sessions’s questioners got nowhere. Defending himself against having allegedly perjured himself regarding meetings with “the Russians,” Sessions said that his answer had to be viewed in context. I happen to agree, and (sorry) I’ve written as much. If you look at the transcript of what was said between Sessions and Al Franken there’s no reasonable basis, at least in the eyes of this reader, for accusing him of perjury.

WATCH: The Trump Administration’s Ties to Russia

Questions about alleged meetings between Russians and Sessions at the Mayflower Hotel also yielded nothing juicy. Even Democrats seemed uninterested in pursuing the matter in depth. Why would Sessions go to a major public event and meet Russians in attendance to plot with them? And does anything in Sessions’s history suggest that he’s disloyal to the United States, let alone traitorous? Trump had a large cast of unsavory characters in his inner circle already. If he wanted to scheme with shadowy foreign operators, he didn’t need a sitting senator. He just needed a sleazeball like Paul Manafort. Or so many others in his life.

Sessions did sustain some damage, however, regarding Comey’s firing. His recusal on Russia-related matters wasn’t the major problem. That’s an arguable case, because it was just one of thousands of things on Comey’s plate. At some point, you have to draw the line on keeping yourself out of the loop. It’s at least debatable. But the rest looked bad.

We know that Trump met with Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 8 to discuss getting rid of Comey, and the president asked them to prepare a memorandum making the case for doing so. What probably took both Sessions and Rosenstein by surprise, however, was that Trump chose to fire Comey just one day later, initially citing Rosenstein’s memo as his reason. If I had to guess what Sessions and Rosenstein thought to themselves, it was probably, “What the hell? How do you think this makes us look?” But all Sessions could actually muster when asked about whether he would have felt “uncomfortable” about his role in Comey’s firing had he known that Trump would imminently pull the trigger was merely, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to deal with those kind of hypotheticals.”