Jeff Sessions testifies before the Senate on Russia ties

Former White House chief strategist turned presidential punching bag Steve Bannon reportedly refused to answer any questions about the presidential transition during an interview with the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of President Trump. He claims that conduct during the transition is covered by “executive privilege,” which protects Trump’s private communications and documents.

It’s not the first time executive privilege has been used by a member of the administration to evade Congressional questioning.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee today. And when he’s been asked about Russia in previous sworn testimony, he’s repeatedly gotten tripped up.

Several times this year, Sessions has tried to downplay allegations and reports that the Trump presidential campaign — which he advised — had inappropriate contacts with Russians. He’s done this under oath, before congressional committees, in multiple sessions.

In the wake of Donald Trump Jr.’s email dump Tuesday, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders read a statement from the president defending his son in an off-camera press briefing.

Trump Jr. had tweeted out a stream of emails in which he agreed to meet with a lawyer with connections to the Russian government in an attempt to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election.

Jeff Sessions wants you, and the rest of the American public, to think that the only important question in the Trump administration’s all-engulfing Russia scandal is this one: Did Trump’s top campaign officials help employees of the Russian government interfere in the US election? And did that collusion change the election’s outcome?

Both of those are questions that Jeff Sessions can answer “no” with, to all appearances, a clear conscience. Both of them let him off the hook.

During his public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer any questions about conversations he might have had with President Donald Trump.

“It would be inappropriate for me to answer and reveal private conversations with the president when he has not had a full opportunity to review the questions and to make a decision on whether or not to approve such an answer,” Sessions told Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich during a contentious exchange.

With every development in the congressional probes into Russia’s alleged ties to President Donald Trump’s team, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) goes through the same routine with reporters.

Asked what he thought of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Mast said he hadn’t watched it.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions dodged many of the most important questions he was asked during his Senate testimony Tuesday, arguing that it would be improper for him to disclose “confidential communications” between him and President Donald Trump.

Senators wanted to know just what Sessions and Trump had discussed about FBI director before Trump fired him, and whether Sessions was surprised to later hear Trump admit that he did so due to the Russia investigation.

Though most of the fireworks took place earlier in the hearing, some of the most important questions Attorney General Jeff Sessions faced during his Senate Intelligence Committee testimony Tuesday actually came at the very end, from Republican Sen. John McCain.

The Arizona lawmaker asked Sessions a series of hard-hitting questions about what issues Sessions brought up in his conversations with Russian officials. Specifically, McCain wanted to know if Sessions had challenged Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about Russia’s interference in the US election, its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, and its support for the murderous Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

For the second time in two weeks, freshman Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was interrupted mid-question at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

At the hearing for Attorney General Jeff Sessions Tuesday afternoon, Harris was asking about a Department of Justice policy Sessions repeatedly referred to when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) interrupted her.

There are definitely some parallels between the possible Trump-Russia link and spy novels and films. That didn’t escape Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who believes the collusion plot is far-fetched.

“Have you ever, in any of these fantastical situations, heard of a plot line so ridiculous that a sitting United States senator and an ambassador of a foreign government colluded at an open setting with hundreds of other people to pull off the greatest caper in the history of espionage?” he asked.

On Tuesday, during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, a top Democrat on the committee sparred with Sessions over his involvement in the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wanted to know what Comey was referring to last week when he testified during a public hearing that Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation for a variety of reasons, which Comey didn’t elaborate on in public. Later, during a private Senate meeting, Comey said there was possibly a third, undisclosed, meeting between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Sessions adamantly denied any “problematic” matters.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) had a testy exchange with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, claiming he was “obstructing” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during his testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. Throughout the testimony, Sessions has been saying it would be “inappropriate” for him to discuss the content of private conversations with the president.

Heinrich, however, did not feel that was correct, and he let Sessions know it.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions could have testified privately before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today about his ties to Russia. Instead, he chose to speak in an open hearing, streamed and broadcast live.

The most straightforward explanation for that choice is that Sessions wants to publicly deny the newest and most incendiary allegation against him: that Sessions met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on three different occasions during the 2016 presidential campaign, and failed to admit to any of them during his confirmation hearings.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, June 13, at 2:30 pm. The hearing will be open to the public and livestreamed on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s website and on Vox’s YouTube.

Sessions has come under serious scrutiny from senators — especially Senate Democrats — over his failure to disclose meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the confirmation process.

It may not be as high-profile an event as James Comey’s testimony last week, but Senate Democrats have a long list of questions they’re preparing to throw at Attorney General Jeff Sessions at his hearing on Tuesday. Sessions will appear in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of its ongoing probe into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The two biggest questions facing Sessions will revolve around whether he effectively recused himself from the Russia investigation — given that he also signed off on Comey’s firing — and whether he committed perjury in failing to disclose contacts with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearing.

When Jeff Sessions testifies today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’ll face tough questions about whether he committed perjury the last time he spoke to the Senate. And as of this morning, Sessions’s alibi suddenly looks a lot less plausible.

During Sessions’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, he told Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) that “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in (the Trump campaign), and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

President Trump can’t seem to leave the Russia investigation alone, even though doing so might’ve let the story die down. First he fired FBI Director James Comey, and now he’s reportedly trying to quash special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with an obscure ethics rule; he keeps feeding the story, to his own detriment.

But here’s the thing: Trump might not know how else to get what he wants.

Jeff Sessions, already one of the most controversial and most influential members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, now finds himself enmeshed in a major scandal. He twice stated — once under oath at his confirmation hearing, another time in answer to a written question from the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member — that he never discussed the 2016 campaign with officials from the Russian government.

The truth is that he had at least two conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — one at an event at the Republican National Committee and another at his office on the same day that Trump’s views of Russia were a major news story.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday announced that he would recuse himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns” for president in 2016.

Things came to a head after a Washington Post report revealed that Sessions had met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign season — and subsequently denied meeting with Russians during Senate hearings for his attorney general nomination months later.

Anyone with a news app on their phone probably received a notification this morning about Republican leaders and other representatives calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from any investigations looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Since then, Sessions announced that he would indeed recuse himself.

If you’re like me, you may have needed some clarification on what “recuse” actually means and quickly looked it up.

President Donald Trump’s Russia scandals are deeply intertwined.

As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes, there are three separate Trump-Russia scandals that together call into question the nature of Trump’s relationship with Russia: the resignation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn; the hacking of the DNC; and the as yet mostly unproven dossier. Now it seems there could be a fourth: The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with Russia’s ambassador to the US twice, even though he has stated twice that he did not.

On Wednesday night, the Washington Post published an explosive report detailing how Jeff Sessions, while a senator, had two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — and failed to disclose them when asked, under oath, about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

A growing number of powerful Republican lawmakers spent Thursday calling for Sessions to recuse himself from the politically-explosive FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Late Thursday afternoon, Sessions gave in, telling reporters that he would not participate in probes “related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is in hot water over revelations that he met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year, despite seeming to have said twice that no such meetings took place. Sessions’s defense hinges on the idea that the meetings had nothing to do with the 2016 campaign or with his work as a Trump adviser, but related instead to his status as a US senator and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

One problem here: Of the 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 25 of them told the Washington Post they had zero meetings with Kislyak in 2016.

In a Thursday afternoon press conference, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he would recuse himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns” for president in 2016.

Investigations related to the 2016 campaign would be handled by his acting deputy, Dana Boente, according to a Justice Department press release. This list would seemingly include reported investigations into Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails, and into contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials.

During his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified, under oath, that “I did not have communications with the Russians.” We now know, thanks to the Washington Post, that this is false: Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the US twice in the past year, when he was serving as both a Trump adviser and a US senator.

The million-dollar questions: Did Sessions break the law? And, if so, could he lose his job — or even be charged with perjury like someone who lied in court? To find out, we reached out to several legal experts who study relevant topics. The general sense was that if Sessions didn’t commit outright perjury, he came uncomfortably close.