US President Donald Trump on Thursday lashed out at Democrats over their demands for US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign, calling their actions a “total witch hunt.”
Sessions on Thursday announced he would recuse himself from any probe into the US presidential election campaign as the White House moved to forestall a snowballing controversy over its ties to Russia.
Following newly revealed meetings he held with Russia’s ambassador before the election, Sessions denied any impropriety or that he lied about those encounters in his US Senate confirmation hearing.
Photo: AFP
The Republican president declared his “total” confidence in Sessions — while adding that he “wasn’t aware” of contacts between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Sessions, who was a senator actively supporting Trump’s campaign at the time.
He defended Sessions again in a statement late on Thursday, calling Sessions an “honest man” and accusing Democrats of having “lost their grip on reality” and carrying out “a total witch hunt!”
Sessions “did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional,” Trump said.
Unswayed by Sessions’ account of events, top Democrats are maintaining their calls for him to step down immediately, accusing him of perjury.
They called for an independent prosecutor to probe contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, which US intelligence says interfered in the election to hurt Trump’s Democratic rival. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Adam Schiff, a Democratic ranking member of the US House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee, rejected Sessions’s claim that his contacts with Kislyak were unrelated to his work with the Trump campaign as “simply not credible.”
“In the midst of a Russian campaign aimed at undermining our election and as a highly visible proxy for candidate Trump, Sessions would have had to be extraordinarily naive or gullible to believe that the ambassador was seeking him out in his office for a discussion on military matters, and Sessions is neither,” Schiff said in a statement.
“I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the attorney general should step down,” he said, echoing calls made earlier by the top Democrats in both chambers of the US Congress.
Trump has come under increasing pressure over Russia’s interference in the election, and alleged contacts between his entourage and Moscow.
US intelligence agencies and the FBI continue to investigate just how and how much Moscow intruded into US politics, and whether that effort involved collusion with the Trump campaign.
Four congressional committees have opened probes into the issue, although Democrats fear that Republicans will seek to bury their investigations to protect Trump’s young administration.
Two weeks ago, Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign amid controversy over his discussions with Kislyak in late December last year, when the administration of former US president Barack Obama was hitting Moscow with retaliatory sanctions for its interference.
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