Late Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had lied under oath about conversations with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during Donald Trump's presidential campaign — news even Republicans found deeply troubling. 

“What does it say, Mika [Brzezinski], when you lie about something that you don’t have to lie about?” Joe Scarborough asked his "Morning Joe" co-host Thursday morning.

Sessions was the lone member of the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee to have met with Kislyak, the Washington Post reports. 

“There is a multiplying effect — when you have your NSA, your national security adviser, lying and having to resign," Scarborough said. "And then you have your attorney general lying in front of Congress over something he shouldn’t have to lie about, because he’s on the armed services committee. He had the right to talk to whomever. Why lie about it? It just compounds all of the questions.”

"The question I still can't get an answer to, from either the Justice Department or the White House is, did they know about this meeting?" political analyst Mark Halperin observed. "It comes out as a bombshell. If it's innocent, it could have just come out as a matter-of-fact thing."

Guest panelist Elise Jordan, a former aide to the George W. Bush White House and a former adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), agreed. 

"There are a lot of foreign ambassadors who attend the Republican and the Democratic convention....This is just your normal procedure that we have entertaining foreign diplomats in the country. It's not a big deal, so why lie," Jordan pointed out.

"I don't get what he's covering up," she added, baffled. "Everyone knows that he had these contacts with the Russian ambassador twice. Why? The coverup is going to be way worse, I predict... [now that] there's all this smoke accumulating about what the Trump administration's involvement is with Russia." 

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