US Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday came under fire after the Washington Post reported that he met twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to Washington, seemingly contradicting statements he made in US Senate confirmation hearings in January.
The revelation cast a fresh cloud over US President Donald Trump’s administration, which has repeatedly denied any suspected ties between members of his election team and Russia — which US intelligence says interfered in last year’s presidential campaign against Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false,” Sessions said in a statement.
Photo: EPA
However, with US intelligence agencies, the US Department of Justice and four US congressional committees examining the Russia scandal, Democrats demanded that Sessions recuse himself from the investigations and for US Congress to name an independent special investigator.
“Given Sessions’ false statements about contacts with Russian officials, we need a special counsel to investigate Trump associates’ ties to Russia,” said US Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Washington Post reported that Sessions — formerly a US senator who advised Trump’s campaign on foreign policy and other issues — met Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak in July and September last year, just as accusations of Russian interference in the election were mounting.
However, Sessions told his confirmation hearing at the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 10 that he did not know of contacts between Trump campaign members and Russia.
“I did not have communications with the Russians,” he said under oath.
US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for Sessions to step down.
“After lying under oath to Congress about his own communications with the Russian, the attorney general must resign,” she said.
Democrat Elijah Cummings of the US House of Representative’s Oversight Committee echoed that call in a statement.
“When Senator Sessions testified under oath that ‘I did not have communications with the Russians,’ his statement was demonstrably false, yet he let it stand for weeks,” Cummings said. “Attorney General Sessions should resign immediately.”
Russia yesterday shrugged off the uproar in Washington.
“The [Russian] embassy doesn’t comment on numerous contacts with local partners, which occur on a daily basis in line with diplomatic practice,” Russian embassy spokesman Nikolai Lakhonin told Russia’s Interfax news agency, when asked to comment on meetings between Sessions and Kislyak.
Russian Senator Alexey Pushkov said the uproar over Sessions showed how paranoid US politicians had become about any links with his country.
“Almost the entire US elite is, it turns out, linked to Russia. Including the attorney general,” Pushkov wrote on social media. “Paranoia knows no bounds.”
Additional reporting by Reuters
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