Can a custom search command launch a splunk search?

Is it possible for a custom search script to launch another splunk search?

I've been looking over the docs and sources for the splunk.Intersplunk module and I'm getting conflicting info. For example, getOrganizedResults() claims that settings will always be an empty dict, but I do get settings back. It also explicitly notes that the auth token is not handled, but the settings value of "sessionKey" is available. (Even when passauth is set to false, interestingly enough.) Then again, I see in crawl.py an example where the sessionKey is being used to make calls back to splunkd using the python SDK, so it seems like this must be working at some level.

However, if I attempt to acutually launch a search using the sessionKey, owner, and namespace that is passed in via the settings dictionary to a new search, then it tells me that I get the following error:

splunk.AuthenticationFailed: [HTTP 401] Client is not authenticated; None

I've done some logging in my search command to confirm that the search command is working and that I'm getting a different sessionKey each time, but the given sessionKey seems to be unusable to launch another search.

If I hard code a call to splunk.auth.getSessionKey (logging on with the same user) then I can make the search work, but that's not really a solution.

Is this a bug, a feature? Any ideas?

Things I've tried:

1. Using a normal (event fetching) search which is fed into my custom search script. If I try to run a saved search, a norm data fetching search, or a non-data command (like "metadata types=hosts") I keep getting the same AuthenticationFailed error shown above.
2. Using a event-generating admin command ("| metadata type=hosts") to feed into my custom search command does allow me to launch a search or saved search successfully.