White House waiting on Russia-probe move

A White House spokesman said Sunday that it’s premature to say that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should recuse himself and appoint a special prosecutor to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election aimed at helping elect Donald Trump.

The assessment by Sarah Huckabee Sanders comes as a growing number of Democrats are calling for Sessions, who was a key figure in Trump’s campaign, to step aside as the FBI and the Justice Department review recent events in a formal investigation.

Appearing Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Sanders said congressional committees looking into Russian activity should be allowed to do their work first.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” she said. “Let’s work through this process. You guys want to jump to the very end of the line.

“We’re confident whatever review that Congress wants to do, that’s the first step,” Sanders said.

Sanders also said the investigations would find no efforts by the Trump campaign to collude with Russians and suggested that the focus on Russia was being driven by Democrats still upset by the election result.

“We’re extremely confi-

dent that, whatever review, they’re all going to come to the same conclusion: that we had no involvement in this,” Sanders said.

“The bigger thing here is, if Democrats want to continue to relive their loss every single day, by doing an investigation or review after review, that’s fine by us,” she added. “We know why we won this race. It’s because we had the better candidate with the better message. They didn’t campaign in the right places. They didn’t have a good candidate, and if they want to continue to relive that loss every single day, then we welcome that.”

Sanders’ assessment comes on the heels of former CIA Director John Brennan’s call for the congressional committees looking into the possibility of interference in last year’s election to “pursue this investigation with vigor and with the appropriate amount of bipartisan support.”

“It’s very important that the investigation be done in a bipartisan fashion,” Brennan, who left the government in January, said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. “If it’s only one party that’s going to be leading this, it is not going to deliver the results that the American people need and deserve.”

Brennan said the White House “needs to understand that the interaction with the FBI on criminal investigations is something that, really, they need to steer clear

of.” He said such contact was “verboten” during his time in government.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said on ABC on Sunday that Sessions needed to recuse himself, and called for “outside, independent commission to study the personal, political, and financial relationship between President Trump and the Russians.”

On the same ABC program, Sanders wouldn’t say whether Sessions should step aside. “Let’s let this play out the way it should,” she said of the ongoing inquiries.

Trump also weighed in on Sunday, telling his 25.6 million Twitter followers that “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican on the Intelligence Committee, also said on Sunday that a recusal was “far down the road from what our inquiry might reveal in the Intelligence Committee or what the FBI’s inquiries might reveal.”

“Right now there’s no credible evidence of these contacts beyond anonymous sources in the media, and I’ve got to tell you, anonymous sources can’t always

be trusted,” Cotton said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

On Friday, Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said a special prosecutor would be appropriate.

His comments came during a broadcast of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher.

Issa, a Trump supporter who serves as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said congressional committees should be allowed to do their work. But when pressed by Maher, Issa added: “You’re right that you cannot have somebody — a friend of mine, Jeff Sessions — who was on the campaign and who is an appointee. You’re going to need to use the special prosecutor’s statute and office.”

Separately, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Kelly assured him Sunday that immigration agents are not conducting random raids and will not target undocumented residents unless they are suspected of being involved in illegal activity.

“He explained to me what the new procedures were,” McAuliffe said Sunday after a private 45-minute briefing with Kelly, a retired general. “I do take a four-star U.S. Marine general at his word.”

McAuliffe, who was in Washington for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, of which he is chairman, had asked Kelly for a meeting to discuss reports that federal agents recently rounded up people outside a church charity shelter in the Washington suburbs of Northern Virginia.

The governor has repeatedly faulted the Trump administration for taking an aggressive stance on immigration, saying it creates a climate of fear and scares away foreign businesses that might want to locate in the state. McAuliffe attended a rally at Dulles International Airport the day Trump imposed his travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations, which has since been stayed by a federal judge.

“I am very concerned about this. It has had a chilling effect,” McAuliffe said. He has said that two businesses that were considering Virginia locations have already walked away out of worry that they would not be welcome.

But in Sunday’s meeting, which was closed to the press, Kelly assured him that there will be no random raids.

“He told me that is not going to happen,” McAuliffe said.

He said he told Kelly that the Trump administration had done a terrible job of making its policy understood by the public. “They need to do a better job with communications because they have scared people,” McAuliffe said.

He said the general responded with “exasperation” and “frustration.” McAuliffe said Kelly told him that he had “tried to get this message out, but it’s just not being reported.”

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner and Gregory S. Schneider of The Washington Post and Ben Brody of Bloomberg News.