Thread: Sessions Met With Russian Ambassador But Didn’t Mislead Senate: Spokeswoman

Sessions Met With Russian Ambassador But Didn’t Mislead Senate: Spokeswoman

Mar 1 2017, 11:28 pm ET
by Hallie Jackson and Alex Johnson

Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not mislead the Senate Judiciary Committee when he testified that he had not met with the Russian ambassador to the United States last year, even though he had, his spokeswoman told NBC News on Wednesday night.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Sessions spoke twice with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak last year, once during a private meeting in Sessions' office in September. Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, was then a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, asked Sessions at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Jan. 10: "If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?"

Sessions replied: "I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it."

Sessions' spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, told NBC News that Sessions did have a conversation with Kislyak last year but that "there was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer" at the hearing.

Sessions met with more than two dozen foreign ambassadors last year in his capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee, Flores said.

As for what Sessions told the Judiciary Committee, "he was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee," she said.

Sessions was the first sitting senator to endorse Donald Trump, exactly one year ago, when he campaigned with Trump in Madison, Alabama.
Image: Jeff Sessions
Jeff Sessions testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be attorney general on Jan. 10. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned last month after it was disclosed that Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence and other senior officials about his communications with Kislyak. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the FBI, which is investigating alleged connections between Russia and Trump's campaign.

Democrats have called for an independent investigation, and on Wednesday night, they raced to call for Sessions to resign or at least to recuse himself from the official investigation.

"Sessions is not fit to serve as the top law enforcement officer of our country and must resign," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said.

"There must be an independent, bipartisan, outside commission to investigate the Trump political, personal and financial connections to the Russians," Pelosi said.

Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, also said Sessions "should resign immediately, and there is no longer any question that we need a truly independent commission to investigate this issue.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: "It is essential that he recuse himself from any role in the investigation.

"This is not even a close call; it is a must," he said.

Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, tweeted: "If it turns out Sessions lied under oath, he of course will be [subject] to criminal prosecution & [should] immediately resign."

An official familiar with Sessions' interactions provided NBC News with a list of what was described as all of the then-senator's known visits with foreign ambassadors last year. The list includes the Sept. 8 meeting with Kislyak.

The official told NBC News that Sessions came in contact with Kislyak a second time at a public event organized in July by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group, where he spoke informally with a small group of ambassadors, including Kislyak.

The official said Sessions often met with ambassadors, discussing bilateral relations and issues, both positive or negative. Ambassadors would often make "superficial comments" about election-related news, the official said. But it was not the substance of their discussions, the official said.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...swoman-n727966

Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose

By Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller March 1 at 9:35 PM

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.

When Sessions spoke with Kislyak in July and September, the senator was a senior member of the influential Armed Services Committee as well as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers. Sessions played a prominent role supporting Trump on the stump after formally joining the campaign in February 2016.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) questioned attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) about news that intelligence officials briefed President-elect Trump on unconfirmed reports that Russia has compromising information on Trump. (Senate Judiciary Committee)

At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.

“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.

“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.

In January, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Sessions for answers to written questions. “Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy wrote.

Sessions responded with one word: “No.”

Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate.

“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Flores said.

She added that Sessions last year had more than 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian and German ambassadors, in addition to Kislyak.

In the case of the September meeting, one department official who came to the defense of the attorney general said, “There’s just not strong recollection of what was said.”

The Russian ambassador did not respond to requests for comment about his contacts with Sessions.

The Washington Post contacted all 26 members of the 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee to see whether any lawmakers besides Sessions met with Kislyak in 2016. Of the 20 lawmakers who responded, every senator, including Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), said they did not meet with the Russian ambassador last year. The other lawmakers on the panel did not respond as of Wednesday evening.

“Members of the committee have not been beating a path to Kislyak’s door,” a senior Senate Armed Services Committee staffer said, citing tensions in relations with Moscow. Besides Sessions, the staffer added, “There haven’t been a ton of members who are looking to meet with Kislyak for their committee duties.”

Last month, The Washington Post reported that Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak during the month before Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, and other top Trump officials. Flynn was forced to resign the following week.

When asked to comment on Sessions’s contacts with Kislyak, Franken said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday: “If it’s true that Attorney General Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.”

Franken added: “It is now clearer than ever that the attorney general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately.”

Current and former U.S. officials say they see Kislyak as a diplomat, not an intelligence operative. But they were not sure to what extent, if any, Kislyak was aware of or involved in the covert Russian election campaign.

Steven Hall, former head of Russia operations at the CIA, said that Russia would have been keenly interested in cultivating a relationship with Sessions because of his role on key congressional committees and as an early adviser to Trump.

Sessions’s membership on the Armed Services Committee would have made him a priority for the Russian ambassador. “The fact that he had already placed himself at least ideologically behind Trump would have been an added bonus for Kislyak,” Hall said.

Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who until 2014 served as U.S. ambassador to Russia, said he was not surprised that Kislyak would seek a meeting with Sessions. “The weird part is to conceal it,” he said. “That was at the height of all the discussions of what Russia was doing during the election.”

Two months before the September meeting, Sessions attended a Heritage Foundation event in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention that was attended by roughly 50 ambassadors. When the event was over, a small group of ambassadors approached Sessions as he was leaving the podium, and Kislyak was among them, the Justice Department official said.

Sessions then spoke individually to some of the ambassadors, including Kislyak, the official said. In the informal exchanges, the ambassadors expressed appreciation for his remarks and some of them invited him to events they were sponsoring, said the official, citing a former Sessions staffer who was at the event.

Democratic lawmakers, including senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have demanded in recent weeks that Sessions recuse himself from the government’s inquiry into possible ties between Trump associates and Russia.

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, became one of the few Republican representatives to state publicly the need for an independent investigation.

Sessions’s public position on Russia has evolved over time.

In an interview with RealClear World on the sidelines of the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum in March 2015, Sessions said the United States and Europe “have to unify” against Russia.

More than a year later, he spoke about fostering a stronger relationship with the Kremlin. In a July 2016 interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sessions praised Trump’s plan to build better relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that’s putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostilities,” Sessions told CNN.

Asked whether he viewed Putin as a good or bad leader, Sessions told CNN: “We have a lot of bad leaders around the world that operate in ways we would never tolerate in the United States. But the question is, can we have a more peaceful, effective relationship with Russia? Utilizing interests that are similar in a realistic way to make this world a safer place and get off this dangerous hostility with Russia? I think it’s possible.”

Julie Tate, Robert Costa and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.fa91edd88fac

Talk about mountains out of molehills. The Democrats know no bounds in their continued quest to delegitimize Trump's presidency and anyone associated with it.

Fake News: Media, Democrats Distort Remarks to Target Jeff Sessions

Andrew Harnick/AP
by Joel B. Pollak1 Mar 2017

Democrats and the media are once again targeting Attorney General Jeff Sessions — this time, over allegations that he met twice with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Washington Post reports that Sessions met Sergey Kislyak once at a Heritage Foundation event in July 2016, where other ambassadors were also present. It also reports that Sessions met with Kislyak in his Senate office in September, in his capacity on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The hook on which the Post attempts to hang Sessions is that he did not disclose the meetings to the Senate when he was asked about “possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow.” Sessions’s spokesperson at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, says his answer in January was truthful because he was asked about “the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee.”

The Post does not provide the full transcript of the question, from Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), and Sessions’s answer. Instead it summarizes the exchange in a way that makes it seem that Sessions was asked if there was any contact at all between the campaign and representatives of the Russian government.

In fact, what Sessions was asked about was sustained, ongoing communications — a core accusation in the dubious “dossier.”

Here, via C-SPAN, is the transcript:

Franken: CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week, that included information that “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” These documents also allegedly say “there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.” Again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

Sessions: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.

Franken: Very well.

Note that Sessions was not actually asked whether he or anyone affiliated with the campaign had any kind of communication with the Russians, ever. He was asked, first, about “a continuing exchange of information” — repeated contacts between the campaign and representatives of the Russian government.

In the full context of Franken’s remarks, it is clear that Sessions was asked about the allegations in the dossier, and he denied such “communications” to the extent of his ability to do so.

In another, written question, the Post notes that Sessions was asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) whether he had “been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day” (emphasis added). Sessions answered, simply, “no.” And there is no evidence in the Post nor elsewhere to cast doubt on that claim.

The New York Times covers the story and adds an interesting wrinkle — namely, that Obama administration officials did whatever they could to distribute information within the government about alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries. (The Times calls this an attempt to “preserve” evidence, which would have been a departure from the Obama administration’s more typical practice of hiding evidence on personal email accounts and hidden email servers.)

That suggests a coordinated hit job, including espionage against the Russian ambassador, and possibly against members of the Trump campaign, even in their unrelated activities.

Regardless, as Flores noted to the Post, Sessions had meetings with “more than 25” ambassadors. The Post lists several of those, but leaves out one crucial country: Ukraine, whose emissary Sessions met the day before meeting with Kislyak. If Sessions was trying to back the Russians, that was an odd way to do it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is calling on Sessions to resign, and the Democratic National Committee is already out with a list-building email, sent Wednesday evening: “BREAKING: Jeff Sessions may have perjured himself.”

But it is all just more “fake news.” A chance greeting at a public event, and a Senate meeting in the course of his official duties, do not add up to anything, and the full transcript — also omitted by the Times — makes it clear Sessions told the truth.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...e-used-target/

The whole purpose of Embassies in national capital cities is to have Ambassadors. For Democrats and the CORRUPT MEDIA or any Republican anywhere to imply that there is wrong-doing associated with meeting with foreign Ambassadors by anyone in the United States is just the craziest thing in the world. The reason for Ambassadors is to meet and greet, attend events, seek our people to develop acquaintances with, to discuss common issues, the weather, politics, business, any and everything that could impact your own nation's well-being as well as that country's or anything else.

We are a free society. Our politicians, citizens, officials, elected Representatives, business people, anyone is free to speak with anyone in the world who wants to speak to us for any reason or with whom we want to speak. Jeff Sessions was a speaker at an event as a sideline to the Republican Convention and 25 Ambassadors were there, one of them was the Russian Ambassador. That was in July. In September, this same Ambassador stops in to meet Sessions, whom he has now met from the July event to have a conversation. What is wrong with that? That would be normal diplomatic duty seems to me, especially considering Sessions is on the Armed Services Committee. The meeting was in Sessions Senate office, for crying out loud.

What is the crime of speaking with a Russian Ambassador or any other nation's Ambassador stationed in our country, especially someone you have now met in person because they heard your speech at an event? This Ambassador from Russia is the one who negotiated the START treaty, which is supposed to coming up soon for renewal as I understand it.

I'm completely lost on what this Congressional Politburo thinks it's up to.

Originally Posted by MW

Talk about mountains out of molehills. The Democrats know no bounds in their continued quest to delegitimize Trump's presidency and anyone associated with it.

The Democrats have been playing fast and lose with a lot of money and funding it to leftist organizations like LaRaza, through the settlement slush fund at the DOJ. Sessions is a dire threat to the corrupt individuals at the DOJ. I hope he prosecutes some of them and puts a few in jail. JMO

Is Russian meddling in our election a crime? Is influencing another nation's election a crime? Hacking is a crime, regardless of who does it, have they found the hacker yet? To me that's the only crime so far, whoever hacked the DNC emails. That's the only crime on the horizon, so unless the "INTEL" community thinks Jeff Sessions, Mike Flynn and/or Donald Trump are the hackers, then this "investigation" is nothing but character assassination.

Mexico meddling in our elections is a crime and coming to Los Angels giving rallies should be stopped. Where is the outrage on that???

Yeah, I mean that's where I'm sitting going what is this about? So what if Russia did "meddle" in the election, so what if Russia hoped or wanted Trump to win? What country wouldn't have preferences in major elections in other countries? Why wouldn't Russia after all these years of being characterized as the "evil empire", want a US President that wants to turn the table on that, become more cooperative, not take the swords off, but at least put them back in sheaths for awhile to explore if enough years have gone by and has Russia progressed western enough, to be a country that the US can have better relations with? What is wrong with that? That is how peace is kept, that is how peace is made, that is how peace is perpetuated.

So what if Americans discuss such things with the Russians? So what if Trump withholds criticism of a nation he would like to improve relations with?

When did we become a country that attacks and investigates peacemakers? When did our Congress become the blockade to peace and the assassins of peacemakers?

Republicans turn up heat on Sessions

CNN

- ‎49 minutes ago‎

(CNN) The Russian cloud hovering over the Trump White House engulfed Attorney General Jeff Sessions Thursday following revelations he failed to disclose pre-election meetings with the Kremlin's ambassador to Washington.


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