Pressure mounts as Sessions backs off from Russia probe
Attorney General Jeff Sessions may not have been clear about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 election, but this much is evident: the controversy over any Kremlin involvement in American politics is not going to fade away anytime soon.
Sessions on Thursday became the second high-ranking member of the Trump administration to take a hit over conversations with Russia’s envoy to the U.S., recusing himself from any probe that examines communications between Trump aides and Moscow. An early backer and key adviser for Trump’s campaign, Sessions said his staff recommended that he step aside from a probe.
“I feel I should not be involved in investigating a campaign I had a role in,” he said.
Sessions’ action followed revelations he twice spoke with the Russian ambassador and didn’t say so when pressed, under oath, by Congress. Though he rejected any suggestion that he tried to mislead anyone, he did allow that he should have been more Attorney General Jeff Sessions pauses during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington.
careful in his testimony.
“I should have slowed down and said, ‘But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times,’” he said.
The recusal, despite White House support for him, followed a chorus of demands that Sessions resolve the seeming contradiction between his two conversations with Moscow’s U.S. envoy, Sergey Kislyak, and
his statements to Congress in January that he had not communicated with Russians during the campaign. It carried echoes of a similar controversy involving retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who two weeks ago resigned as national security adviser after misleading White House officials about his own discussions with Kislyak.
Additional communication was revealed Thursday between Kislyak and Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at New York’s Trump Tower. In addition, Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, spoke with the ambassador last summer, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said contacts with officials and lawmakers are part of any ambassador’s duties and that pressure on Sessions “strongly resembles a witch hunt or the times of McCarthyism, which we thought were long over in the United States as a civilized country.”
Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s led a hunt for communist traitors he believed worked in the government and the army.
The recusal means the attorney general should not receive any briefings on it and have no information to provide to Congress or the public. But Sessions’ decision to leave the matter in the hands of a top deputy may not cool demands that someone from outside the department provide a fully independent set of eyes.