President says he regrets hiring Sessions as attorney-general
DONALD TRUMP JR
under oath.
“There has been an enormous amount that has been said publicly but it’s not under oath, which means that people are free to omit matters or lie with relative impunity,” Whitehouse told CNN.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting one of the main investigations of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election and possible collusion by Trump associates, but the Judiciary committee has been looking into related issues.
Public hearing
The public Judiciary hearing will look into rules governing the registration of agents working for foreign governments in the United States and foreign attempts to influence US elections.
Chuck Grassley, the committee’s Republican chairman, has said he wanted to question the Trump associates, but has also raised concerns about why the Obama administration allowed Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended the Trump Tower meeting in June, into the United States.
He also has called before the committee and threatened to subpoena Glenn Simpson, a cofounder of Fusion GPS, a firm that commissioned former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to dig up opposition research on Trump, when he was a presidential candidate.
UJARED KUSHNER S President Donald Trump said he regretted his choice for attorney-general on Wednesday as he sought to protect himself from the growing firestorm over Russia’s alleged election meddling which is engulfing his presidency.
On the eve of the six-month mark of Trump’s inauguration, it also emerged that senators will next week grill three of the pivotal players in the Trump campaign — including his eldest son — over swirling allegations of the presidential campaign’s collusion with Russia.
The announcements came as the Trump administration and the Kremlin tried to quell an uproar about a previously undisclosed meeting between Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin during this month’s G20 summit. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was one of the first senior Republican politicians to endorse Trump before last November’s election and was rewarded by being appointed America’s top law enforcement officer.
But he stood aside in March from overseeing an FBI-led probe into whether members of the Trump team colluded with Moscow during the election campaign after it emerged that Sessions had not disclosed during his Senate confirmation hearing that he met twice with the Russian ambassador to Washington.
In an interview with the New York Times, PAUL MANAFORT Trump said Sessions had acted unfairly in taking the job in the first place if he had felt in any way compromised.
“How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you,’” Trump said.
“It’s extremely unfair — and word — to the president.”
Trump also criticised Sessions’ performance at the Senate confirmation hearing in January, in which he denied meeting with any Russians when he had in fact met with the Russian ambassador.
‘Bad answers’
that’s a mild
“Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said in his interview with the Times.
“He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee is now due to grill the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is one of the most powerful figures in the Trump White House, in a closed-door session next Monday, his lawyer told CNN.
And two days later, the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort about Russia’s role, congressional officials announced on Wednesday.