The attorney general likely holds several keys to the Russia investigation.
This is no big deal, it’s just the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and a member of the president’s Cabinet being interviewed by a special counsel in a criminal probe.
The New York Times reported Tuesday morning that special counsel Robert Mueller interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions as part of the Russia investigation last week.
Sessions is the first Cabinet member known to have met with the special counsel, who in recent weeks seems to be moving deeper into Donald Trump’s inner circle. He recently interviewed Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, and will talk former Trump adviser Steve Bannon soon after subpoenaing him to appear before a grand jury.
Based on the indictments and plea deals already brought against Trump team members, Mueller seems to be running a wide-ranging investigation. But as far as Sessions is concerned, there are likely two particular issues of interest. From the Times:
For Mr. Mueller, Mr. Sessions is a key witness to two of the major issues he is investigating: the campaign’s possible ties to the Russians and whether the president tried to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Sessions met Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak multiple times during the campaign but later lied about it at his confirmation hearings. He was also in the famous foreign policy adviser meeting with Trump and George Papadopoulos, who apparently spent much of the campaign trying to broker meetings between the senior Trump team members and Russian government officials. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Depending on what Papadopoulos has told investigators — and just this week a federal judge postponed his sentencing by three months because he is not done cooperating with the government, which indicates he still has a lot to tell them — Mueller might think Sessions knows a lot about the former issue.
As for the second, there were surely questions about what Sessions knows about Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.
Comey said he believed that an attorney general should protect the FBI from improper influence from the White House and went so far as to warn Sessions never to let the president get him alone in a one-on-one meeting. Meanwhile, Trump has spent the past year raging at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation because he is under the belief that the attorney general should have been protecting him.
What, if anything, Sessions may have done to take the president’s side when he found himself caught between those two positions will likely point the way to any obstruction of justice charges against Trump, if such charges are coming.
One wonders if Trump is having any second thoughts about the way he has belittled and publicly humiliated Sessions for the past year.
