We keep learning that he hasn’t told the full story.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions just keeps getting tripped up over his sworn Russia testimony.
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.
And yet we keep learning that he hasn’t told the full story.
The latest problem for Sessions stems from news that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians.
According to a court document unsealed Monday, Papadopoulos now admits that during a March 31,2016, meeting with Trump and other campaign foreign policy advisers, he said he had connections that could help set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Sessions, who chaired the Trump campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, was at that meeting (pictured here):
People who attended the meeting are now telling reporters that it was Sessions himself who shot down Papadopoulos’s idea for a Trump-Putin meeting. “Sen. Sessions shut down that discussion because it was a bad idea,” Trump campaign adviser J. D. Gordon said this week.
Yet somehow, in hours of sworn congressional testimony in which Sessions was repeatedly asked about whether people on the Trump campaign had contacts with Russians, he never saw fit to mention this exchange. (Furthermore, after this, Papadopoulos spent months trying to arrange meetings with Russian officials and a trip to Russia.)
Now, CNN’s Manu Raju, Evan Perez, and Marshall Cohen report that Sessions is “under renewed scrutiny” on Capitol Hill about whether his testimony was forthcoming enough here — and about whether he may have been hiding anything else.
This may feel familiar, because Sessions has been in this position before. Back during his confirmation hearing for the attorney general job, in January, he had this exchange with Sen. Al Franken (D-MN):
That answer has dogged Sessions ever since. In early March 2017, it emerged that Sessions had in fact had one meeting with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in September 2016, and had also encountered him at an event at the Republican convention two months earlier. That sure seemed to contradict his statement that he “did not have communications with the Russians.”
To explain this, Sessions argued that his sit-down meeting with Kislyak was in the course of his Senate business, not his work for the Trump campaign, and that the other encounter was inconsequential. He’s also said Franken’s question came at the end of a “rambling” discussion after six hours of testimony, suggesting he was taken off guard and the Kislyak meeting didn’t immediately come to mind.
Still, in the wake of this controversy, Sessions announced that he’d recuse himself from all investigative matters related to the presidential campaign.
Yet when James Comey testified to the Senate months later, shortly after his firing as FBI director, he hinted there may be more to the story of Sessions’s recusal. “We also were aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic,” he said .
Since then, Sessions has testified again before Congress on these topics. On October 18, he had this exchange with Franken in which he outright claimed he did not believe Trump surrogates ever communicated with the Russians (an exchange Marcy Wheeler recently flagged at the Intercept):
That statement stood out for its broadness — it disavowed any knowledge of any Trump surrogates having communications with the Russians.
But to most other questions on the topic, Sessions deliberately tried to frame his statements in a less sweeping way. For instance, take this testimony in June:
Note that Sessions was careful there not to deny contacts with Russians — or even contacts with Russians about the campaign. The denial there is about conversations with Russians about “interference” with the campaign. It’s more specific.
This week, we learned that for months during the 2016 campaign, foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was in contact with people he believed were connected to the Russian government, as he tried to set up a meeting with Russian government officials or a trip to Russia. He emailed several different Trump campaign advisers to tell them about these efforts, and at least one campaign official — national co-chair Sam Clovis — appeared to encourage them. And, perhaps most concerningly, he got a tip that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
There are general questions about whether Jeff Sessions knew about any of this. There are also questions about a pair of specific interactions he had with Papadopoulos and with another Trump adviser with curious Russian connections, Carter Page.
The March 31,2016 meeting: As mentioned above, Sessions attended a March 31 meeting with Trump himself and the foreign policy advisers, at which Papadopoulos said he had Russian connections and could arrange a meeting with Putin. Here’s Gordon’s on-the-record account of what happened there (given to One America News Network):
Sources close to Sessions have anonymously suggested that he didn’t mention this in his testimony because the interaction didn’t leave a “lasting impression” on him.
But Sen. Franken, for one, isn’t buying it. “If your statements at the March 31 meeting were reported accurately, it would signal that you reacted strongly to Mr. Papadopoulos,” Franken wrote in a letter to Sessions this week. “Such a strong reaction also suggests that Mr. Papadopoulos’s comments during the meeting would have been memorable to you.”
The Capitol Hill Club dinner in summer 2016: There are also reports that both Sessions and Papadopoulos attended another meeting of Trump foreign policy advisers, for a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club in late June or early July. (Per the Washington Post, the two sat next to each other .)
Also attending the dinner was Carter Page — another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who tended to say very positive things about Vladimir Putin and was soon planning to travel to Moscow (though, he’s said, not as an official campaign representative).
This week, Page testified to a closed-door session of the House Intelligence Committee that during that dinner, he told Sessions that he was headed to Russia soon. But in discussing his testimony with CNN afterward, he portrayed the interaction as inconsequential:
But of course, this is another addition to the list of Russia-related interactions that Sessions failed to recall during congressional testimony.
