To me the big takeaway from the Sessions hearing is this:
If you had a guy who had meetings in his past that he hoped nobody would find out about but knew people might, a guy who knew all sorts of shady crap his colleagues were doing but again hoped that nobody would find out about them, a guy who had already been caught in these lies once and who was smart enough to know that he risked being perjury if caught again, you'd expect that guy to give a whole lot of "can't remembers" and "can't comments" for vague legal reasons that seem pulled out of thin air. Which isn't to say that Sessions is necessarily guilty of anything; it's just that his answers are exactly the answers you would expect someone who's guilty as hell to give, and he did absolutely zero to exonerate himself or the administration.
I think the administration had a plan that him refusing to testify about conversations with the president would be received as proper and patriotic to contrast with Comey's willingness to divulge his own conversations with the president. They may still try and sell it like that to their base, but I don't think it played out the way they hoped it would.
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