Attorney general grilled in Russia probe
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week as part of the special counsel investigation, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday, making him the first member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to be interviewed in the inquiry.
The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is increasingly focused on Trump’s conduct in office and on whether he obstructed the investigation itself.
Mueller has also told the president’s lawyers that he will most likely want to interview Trump, and one person familiar with the discussions has said that the special counsel appeared most interested in asking questions about the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, and about the former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
Those topics show Mueller has an interest in whether the president tried to obstruct justice.
Mueller’s investigators have asked current and former Trump administration officials about what Trump cited as reasons for Comey’s firing, and why Trump was so concerned about having someone loyal to him oversee the Russia investigation, people familiar with the interviews said.
For Sessions, the interview was the latest in a balancing act that has lasted nearly a year.
He has sought to get back in Trump’s good graces by pursuing investigations into issues like leaks to the news media and relaying Trump’s displeasure about senior FBI leadership to the bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray.
But Sessions has also tried to present a veneer of independence in congressional testimony and now has met with investigators in Mueller’s inquiry, which has for months cast a shadow over the Trump White House.
News of the interview set off a day of revelations that highlighted Trump’s charged relationship with his top law enforcement officials. Comey was said on Tuesday to have met last year with Mueller’s investigators to answer questions about memos he wrote detailing interactions with the president that had unnerved him.
Trump also said he was not troubled that Sessions met with the special counsel and denied a report that Wray had threatened to resign.
“He didn’t at all,” Trump said of Wray, adding: “He did not even a little bit. Nope. He’s going to do a good job.”
The report, by the website Axios, said Sessions was pressuring Wray, at the president’s behest, to clear the FBI of loyalists to Comey.
But Wray responded that he needed to move at his own pace to make changes, and that if Sessions and the president wanted replacements made more quickly, someone else would have to do it, a person familiar with the exchange said, adding that Wray stopped short of threatening to quit.
Wray’s tenure has been tense as the president has repeatedly fanned suspicion about whether the FBI’s work is politically motivated, including the Russia investigation.