Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
SESSIONS REBUKED GOP CALLS FOR SPECIAL CLINTON COUNSEL
from any political pressures and provides the necessary tools to hopefully get to the bottom of what happened and why it happened,” said Schweizer, whose nonprofit organization was co-founded by Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.
At Tuesday’s hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Sessions denied that he was responding to Trump’s public pressure. “A president cannot improperly influence an investigation,” Sessions said, “and I have not been improperly influenced and would not be improperly influenced. The president speaks his mind. He’s a bold and direct about what he says, but people elected him. But we do our duty every day based on the law and facts.”
Even as he rebuffed Democrats suggesting he had been compromised, Sessions pushed back against Republicans who pressed him on why he had not already appointed a special counsel. “What’s it going to take to get a special counsel?” demanded Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
“It would take a factual basis that meets the standards of the appointment of a special counsel,” Sessions said.
Jordan raised questions about a dossier of salacious assertions about Trump prepared last year by a firm paid by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Jordan said “it sure looks like” the Democrats collaborated with the FBI to use the dossier to persuade a secret intelligence court to issue a warrant to spy on Americans associated with Trump’s campaign. “That’s what it looks like,” Jordan said.
Sessions bridled at that. “I would say ‘looks like’ is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel,” he retorted.
Among the issues being examined, according to a Justice Department letter to the committee, is the uranium case. In 2010, Russia’s atomic energy agency acquired Uranium One, a Canadian company that at the time controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity. The purchase was approved by a government committee that included representatives of nine agencies, including Clinton’s State Department.
Donors related to Uranium One and another company it acquired contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and former President Bill Clinton received $500,000 from a Russian bank for a speech. But there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton participated in the government approval of the deal, and her aides have noted that other agencies signed off on it. The company’s actual share of U.S. uranium production has been 2 percent; the real benefit for Russia was securing far greater supplies of uranium from Kazakhstan.
Other issues mentioned in the Justice Department letter include Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which was investigated by the FBI until the bureau’s director at the time, James Comey, declared last year that no prosecutor would press charges based on the evidence. The letter said the department was also examining Comey for leaking details of his conversations with Trump after the president fired him.
To the extent that there may be legitimate questions about Clinton or Comey, however, the credibility of any investigation presumably would be called into question should one be authorized by Sessions or his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, because of the way it came about under pressure from Trump.
Of 10 former attorneys general contacted last week, only one responded to a question about what they would do in Sessions’ situation.
“There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” said William P. Barr, who ran the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush. “Although an investigation shouldn’t be launched just because a president wants it, the ultimate question is whether the matter warrants investigation.”
Barr said he sees more basis for investigating the uranium deal than any supposed collusion between Trump and Russia. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters, the department is abdicating its responsibility,” Barr said.
Trump promised last year that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton. But he backed off that pledge shortly after the election, saying, “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons.”
By last summer, with Mueller’s special counsel investigation bearing down, he had changed his mind. To Trump, the inquiry was a “witch hunt” based on a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. It was all the more galling, advisers said, because Clinton had not been prosecuted, a frustration exacerbated by recent reports about how her campaign helped finance the salacious dossier.