Mueller team spends hours with Sessions

Russia-probe meeting is first for a Trump Cabinet official

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week by the special counsel’s office as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election and whether the president obstructed justice since taking office, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

The meeting marked the first time that investigators for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, are known to have interviewed a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he was “not at all concerned” about what Sessions may have told the Mueller team.

In response to questions from The New York Times, the spokesman, Sarah Isgur Flores, confirmed that the interview occurred. Sessions was accompanied by longtime Washington lawyer Chuck Cooper to the interview.

The attorney general announced in March that he had recused himself from all matters related to the 2016 election, including the Russia inquiry. The disclosure came after it was revealed that Sessions had not told Congress that he met twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey Kislyak, during the campaign.

Sessions, an early supporter of Trump’s presidential run, had been among a small group of senior campaign and administration officials Mueller had been expected to interview.

Mueller’s interest in Sessions shows how the president’s own actions helped prompt a broader inquiry. What began as a Justice Department counter intelligence investigation into Russia’s election interference is now also an examination of whether Trump tried to obstruct the inquiry, and the nation’s top law enforcement officer is a witness in the case.

For Mueller, Sessions is a key witness to two of the major matters he is investigating: the campaign’s possible ties to the Russians and whether the president tried to obstruct the Russia investigation.

Mueller can question Sessions about his role as the head of the campaign’s foreign-policy team. Sessions was involved in developing Trump’s position toward Russia and met with Russian

officials, including the ambassador.

Along with Trump, Sessions led a March 2016 meeting at Trump International Hotel in Washington, where one of the campaign’s foreign-policy advisers, George Papadopoulos, pitched the idea of a personal meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to federal authorities about the nature of his contacts with the Russians and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office.

As attorney general, Sessions was also deeply involved in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey at a time when Comey was overseeing the Russia probe, and the president has repeatedly criticized Sessions publicly and privately for recusing himself from the investigation.

The White House initially said the May 9 termination was done on the recommendation of the Justice Department and cited as justification a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that faulted Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation.

But Trump said later that he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he fired Comey, and he had decided to make the move even before the Justice Department’s recommendations.

STRUGGLES, ASSERTIONS

Potential topics for Sessions during his Mueller interview were any interactions he had with Papadopoulos, as well as about his own encounters during the campaign with the Russian ambassador.

At times, the attorney general has struggled to explain what was said in private meetings that are now of interest to investigators.

During his confirmation hearing in early 2017, Sessions was asked what he would do if he learned there had been contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign, and he answered: “I did not have communications with the Russians.”

After The Washington Post reported that he met at least twice with Kislyak in 2016, Sessions announced he was recusing himself from investigations involving the election, based on the advice of Justice Department ethics lawyers.

He has since maintained that he misunderstood the scope of the question at his confirmation hearing, and that his meetings with Kislyak were fleeting or strictly in his capacity as a U.S. senator. In announcing his recusal, Sessions said: “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign.”

That assertion is contradicted by the accounts Kislyak provided to his superiors in Moscow, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Kislyak reported to his bosses that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy matters important to Moscow, with Sessions during the 2016 presidential race.

One U.S. official said that Sessions has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related matters and prospects for U. S.- Russia relations in a Trump administration.

Mueller has been investigating the events leading up to Flynn’s dismissal from the White House in February.

Comey says he documented that conversation in a memo, one of a series of contemporaneous notes he kept of conversations with the president that troubled him. The New York Times, which first reported the interview with Sessions, said that investigators spoke to Comey last year about his memos.

Over the past several months Mueller investigators have spoken with other people close to the president, including White House Counsel Don McGahn, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the probe of campaign contacts with Russia and possible obstruction.

Two weeks ago, Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to testify before a grand jury. Mueller is expected to forgo the grand jury appearance for now and will have his investigators interview Bannon in the coming weeks.

Potential topics for Sessions during his Mueller interview were any interactions he had with Papadopoulos, as well as about his own encounters during the campaign with the Russian ambassador.

QUESTIONS FOR TRUMP

With many of Trump’s closest aides having now been questioned, the president and his lawyers are preparing for the prospect of an interview that would likely focus on some of the same obstruction questions.

Mueller wants to question Trump about his decision to fire Comey as well as the removal of Flynn, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Trump’s lawyers have held several conversation with Mueller’s team in recent weeks to discuss a possible interview with the president as part of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and whether anyone close to Trump colluded in it, according to another person briefed on the situation.

Working out details for an interview could take several weeks, the person said after Mueller’s planned lines of questioning were reported by the Post.

The Post reported that expected topics for any sitdown with Mueller would include not only Comey’s firing but also interactions the fired FBI director has said unnerved him, including a request from the president that he end an investigation into national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Flynn was involved in communications with Russians before he was removed from his White House post last February. He has since pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators over those contacts and has become a cooperating witness in Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller also has indicated he would like to call back several White House aides who were interviewed early on to ask about additional information he has received, the person said. The interviews are expected to be brief and don’t necessarily indicate significant changes in the investigation, according to the person.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; by Eric Tucker, Sadie Gurman and Catherine Lucey of The Associated Press; by Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett and Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post; and by Chris Strohm and Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg News.

Sessions