The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sessions recuses himself from Russia investigation
AG says he did not try to mislead anyone about talks with envoy.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing a storm of criticism over newly disclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, recused himself on Thursday from any investigation into charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
His announcement, delivered at a terse news conference, came after a day of rapid-fire developments in a murky affair that has shadowed President Donald Trump, jeopardized his closest aides and intensified pressure for a full investigation into Moscow’s attempts to influence the election, as well as raise persistent questions about the policies of the new administration.
Trump stoutly defended Sessions, one of his few early champions on Capitol Hill, but many top Democrats demanded Sessions’ resignation, and a growing number of Republicans declared that he should not take part in any investigation into the case, given his own still largely unexplained role in it.
Sessions insisted there was nothing nefarious about his two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, even though he did not disclose them to the Senate during his confirmation hearing and they occurred during the heat of the race between Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and Trump, whom Sessions was advising on national security.
In his account of the more substantive meeting, which took place in his Senate office on Sept. 8, Sessions described Kislyak as one of a parade of envoys who seek out lawmakers like him to glean information about U.S. policies and promote the agendas of their governments.
“Somehow, the subject of Ukraine came up,” Sessions said, recalling that the meeting grew testy after the ambassador defended Russia’s conduct toward its neighbor and heaped blame
on everybody else.
“I thought he was pretty much of an old-style, Soviet-type ambassador,” Sessions said, noting that he did not accept a lunch invitation from Kislyak.
Sessions’ decision to recuse himself was one of his first public acts as attorney general. He said he made the decision after consulting with officials at the Justice Department, and he denied misleading Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who asked the question during his confirmation hearing that prompted his response that he had not met with Russian officials about the Trump campaign.
“In retrospect,” Session told reporters, “I should have slowed down and said, ‘But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times, and that would be the ambassador.’”
The latest disclosures — and the Trump administration’s contradictory accounts of them — have deepened the questions about Russia’s role in the election and its aftermath. It has fueled calls for congressional and independent investigations, and toppled another close Trump aide, Michael Flynn, who resigned as national security adviser last month after admitting he had misled the administration over his contacts with Kislyak.
Sessions’ decision to recuse himself exposed a rift between the White House and the Justice Department, not only over whether he should do so — Trump said he did not think he needed to — but over the president’s public assertions about the issue. A Justice Department official confessed puzzlement about why the White House regularly asserted that no one from the Trump campaign had any contact with the Russian government.
Trump said that he “wasn’t aware” that Sessions had spoken to the ambassador, but that he believed the attorney general had testified truthfully during his confirmation hearing.
Within Trump’s inner circle, Flynn appears to have been the primary interlocutor with the Russian envoy. The two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Kislyak and current and former U.S. officials have said. But Sessions served as the chairman of Trump’s national security committee — a post that Democrats said would have made him a sought-after target for officials from many foreign countries.
There is nothing unusual about meetings between campaigns and foreign diplomats. Kislyak was one of several envoys who attended the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where his first meeting with Sessions, according to the attorney general, was a brief encounter after a panel organized by the Heritage Foundation. Ambassadors also attended the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, though it was not clear whether Kislyak was among them.
“Active embassies here consider it as their assignment to stretch out feelers to presidential hopefuls,” said Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the United States, who met most of the Republican candidates, though not Trump. “I don’t consider it as something unusual or problematic.”
The trouble in Sessions’ case is that his meeting came as the nation’s intelligence agencies were concluding that Russia had tried to destabilize the election and, ultimately, help Trump. Sessions’ initial lack of disclosure of the meetings with Kislyak added to suspicions that it was more than runof-the-mill diplomacy.
The disclosure, first reported by The Washington Post, contradicted forceful and repeated denials from the White House that anyone from the campaign had discussions with the Russians.
“I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump said at a news conference on Feb. 20. “To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
When Sessions was asked at Thursday’s news conference whether he and the ambassador had discussed Trump or the upcoming election, he said, “I don’t recall.” Ambassadors, he added, are typically “pretty gossipy” and “this was in campaign season, but I don’t recall any specific political discussions.”
At Sessions’ confirmation hearing, Franken asked him about a CNN report that after the election intelligence briefers had told President Barack Obama and Trump that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising information about Trump.
Franken also noted that the report indicated that surrogates for Trump and intermediaries for the Russian government continued to exchange information during the campaign. He asked Sessions what he would do if that report proved true.
Sessions replied that he was “not aware of any of those activities.” He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”