At various points during Jeff Sessions' evasive testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the attorney general made a startling admission: He had violated the scope of his recusal from the ongoing investigations into the 2016 presidential campaigns. Because this question has gotten reasonably complicated. Sens. Al Franken of Minnesota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont have sought an FBI investigation.
Those questions were prompted after a friend of President Donald Trump said the White House was considering firing Mueller. Sessions repeatedly stated Tuesday that his recommendation that Trump fire Comey did not conflict with his recusal from the Justice Department's Russian Federation investigation. And he answered his own question by saying, well, I didn't meet with or communicate with the Russians during the campaign.
On Tuesday, Sessions gave a different account of this conversation, insisting that he had spoken up and said that yes, it was important the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice follow guidelines in this matter. However, there was a significant difference in the way that Comey and Sessions remembered that second incident, and that difference was in every answer Sessions gave.
Attorney General Sessions appeared to have a two-pronged strategy for his appearance, which came in the wake of fired FBI Director James Comey's dramatic testimony last week.
We had little hope that Mr. Sessions' testimony would advance the investigation, and we weren't surprised by its uselessness. He asserted that "I am protecting the right of the president to assert if it he chooses and there may be other privileges that may apply". "So, I need to be correct as best I can", Sessions said. Sessions tactics may have provided a roadmap for the White House to keep its secrets without the public-relations blowback of invoking executive privilege.
Trump has recently expressed frustration with Sessions, who has come under pressure over his own Russian Federation contacts.
He first stated that he "did not have any private meetings, nor do I recall any conversations with any Russian officials" at the Trump campaign event, but under questioning expressed less certainty.
US President Donald Trump's administration has been dogged by allegations of collusion with the Kremlin in last year's election. Sessions then joined Trump's campaign team as an advisor.
Sessions recused himself from the Russian Federation investigation in March after revelations that he had failed to disclose two meetings past year with Russia's ambassador to Washington, Sergei Kislyak.
Pyongyang returns USA student, now in a coma
Two of them, Kim Sang Duk and Kim Hak-song, are academics who worked at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Warmbier's parents were told their son was given a sleeping pill soon after his trial in March a year ago and never woke.
Asked about media reports that he had met with Kislyak on a third occasion at a Washington hotel a year ago, Sessions testified that did not remember meeting or having a conversation with the ambassador at the event.
SESSIONS: No - yes, I do.
Sessions played a key role in the official narrative of Comey's dismissal by endorsing the conclusions of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a memo criticizing the way Comey had handled the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email practices as secretary of state.
During the two-and-a-half hour hearing, he engaged in testy exchanges with several senators who pressed him for details on his discussions with Trump - which he refused to provide in the name of confidentiality. Coats was attending a briefing at the White House then with officials from other government agencies.
But in the rat-a-tat-tat of follow-up questions, Sessions slowly pried that door open again, by increasingly hedging his answers.
"There are none. There are none", Sessions said.
When Senator Kamala Harris, D-CA, asked if the Department's policies were contained in a written document, Sessions said, "I believe so".
We don't know whether special counsel Mueller is investigating a potential obstruction of justice case based on Comey's assertion that Trump asked him at that April 14 meeting to drop the FBI's investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
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