Attorney General Sessions defends Russia testimony
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought Monday to clarify his denial to the Senate about contact with Russian officials during the presidential campaign, a misstatement that led him to recuse himself from overseeing federal investigations into meddling by the Kremlin in the U.S. election.
Reports that Sessions met with the Russian ambassador twice during the campaign sparked a storm of demands last week on Capitol Hill for the former U.S. senator from Alabama to recuse himself from the investigations or resign.
He announced his recusal Thursday and promised to send a letter to clarify his January testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the letter, Sessions told his former colleagues that he had correctly answered a question when he said he “did not have communications with Russians” during the campaign.
Sessions reiterated what he told reporters last week: that he had focused on part of the question posed by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that sought to determine what the attorney general would do about “continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”
Sessions said in the letter that he answered honestly.
“I did not mention communications I had had with the Russian ambassador over the years because the question did not ask about them,” Sessions wrote.
The FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating whether anyone on then-candidate Donald Trump’s team colluded with Russia’s government while the Kremlin was hacking Democratic Party computers and seeking to disrupt the campaign.
The issue has cast a cloud over the fledgling Trump administration, which has denied any improper contacts. Trump ousted his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, last month for misleading the White House about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign.
The Justice Department disclosed last week that Sessions also met twice with Kislyak in 2016, first after a speech at the Republican National Convention in July and then in a private sit-down meeting in Sessions’ Senate office in September.
Justice Department officials have said that Sessions had conversations with more than two dozen foreign ambassadors and that his meeting with Kislyak was not unusual. They said he met the Russian diplomat in his capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee, not as a representative of the Trump campaign.
The day before his sit-down with the Russian, he met the Ukranian ambassador, for example, they said.
In comments to reporters, Sessions described his encounters with Kislyak as pro forma discussion. He described Kislyak as an “old-style, Soviet-type ambassador” and added that their conversation grew testy over Russia’s support for separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine.