Attorney General Jeff Sessions is set to testify Tuesday to the Senate intelligence committee, the latest official to go before the panel as it investigates Russian meddling in the US election and potential coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of being dishonest in his testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and tried to make the case that he was unfit to be attorney general on MSNBC's "All in With Chris Hayes" Tuesday.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a star player in two key controversies about the Trump administration: the investigation into Donald Trump campaign's connections with Russian Federation and whether the president improperly interfered in an FBI investigation.
The evasive Sessions said he could not reveal whether he had spoken with Trump about the Russian Federation investigation.
Sessions told the senators he has confidence in Mueller but said he had "no idea" if Trump did because he had not spoken to the president about the matter.
Comey said he held back because he expected Sessions to withdraw from the Russian Federation inquiry, and the bureau was aware of "facts that I can't discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic". "You're impeding this investigation". "I'm not going to follow any orders unless I believe they are lawful", and that "it wouldn't matter what anybody said".
The attorney general defended himself - at times fervently - when asked about this testimony from fired FBI Director James Comey.
Attorney General Jeff Session testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday regarding the investigation into Russian election meddling. That cut off lines of inquiry about the exact circumstances surrounding Comey's firing, what may have happened in the February 14 Oval Office meeting in which Sessions was asked to leave so Trump could speak one-on-one with Comey, as well as Trump's reaction to Sessions' recusal.
"I affirmed his concern that we should be following the proper guidelines of the Department of Justice". Sessions says he was there for a speech by then-candidate Donald Trump and members of Sessions' staff were also in attendance. He said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had long discussed their concerns with Comey's job performance. He offered a new, and unclassified, reason for recusing himself from the probe, pointing to a Department of Justice rule that Sessions says bars Department of Justice employees from probing a campaign in which they participated.
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Using vague legal justification, Sessions shut down potentially important lines of investigative questioning - and that may be exactly how the White House wants it.
Sessions' appearance before the intelligence committee is an indication of just how much the Russian Federation investigation has shaded his tenure. And by the time Sessions met with Kislyak at his office in September, then-President Barack Obama had already commented on the Russian hacking campaign and hinted at what could have motivated it.
"Did the president, in any of those interactions that you've shared with us today, ask you what you should be doing, or what our government should be doing, or the intelligence community, to protect America against Russian interference in our election system?"
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, noting the comments from other officials who said they had recently been overseas, noted wryly: "While we are bragging about worldwide travel I just got back from MS and they like you there". "I may have had an encounter" with Ambassador Kislyak at a District of Columbia hotel in April 2016, Sessions allowed.
When asked by Cotton whether the collusion of a sitting U.S. senator and a foreign ambassador would ever appear in one of these "fantastical situations", like a clandestine meeting at the Mayflower Hotel, Sessions used another literary reference to demonstrate what he sees as the ridiculousness of such a theory. Several media outlets have reported that Comey told the Intelligence Committee in closed session last week that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was examining whether Sessions met with Kislyak at a Washington hotel a year ago.
"I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against scurrilous and false allegations", Attorney General Jeff Sessions said.
Sessions repeatedly told senators he did not recall, did not remember or had no recollection of the events they wanted answers about. For one thing, the attorney general testified in a separate congressional hearing: "I have confidence in Mr. Mueller".
Sessions did not invoke "executive privilege". As the two spoke over one another in a tense exchange, Sessions told Harris, "I'm not able to be rushed this fast".
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