More from WAPO, The CIA newspaper of record:
Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose
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.
At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, 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.”
[Trump administration sought to enlist intelligence officials, key lawmakers to counter Russia stories]
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.
Riiight…
Just like James Clapper.
More:
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 if any lawmakers besides Sessions met with Kislyak in 2016. Of the 19 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.
[National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say]
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.”
—snip—
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 Kislayk was among them, the Justice Department official said.
—snip—
One step forward, two steps back.
PermaGov way ahead of TrumpenGov, so far.
For every move the Trump forces make, the Deep State has two.
Or more.
It’s like the Boston Patriots playing an interesting but ultimately lower level team. The Trumps are all offense (radically different offense), but their defense sucks and so does their overall organization.
One superstar player cannot carry a team, especially if he is an egomaniac.
As below, so above.
Watch.
AG
Democrats are assuming both a question that wasn’t posed to Sessions and an answer to that unasked question that Sessions didn’t give.
Democrats are also treading on dangerous grounds and more than one. In their hysteria, they’ve leaped to conclude the US election was a topic in a discussion between Sessions and the DC Russian Ambassador. However, so what if it was broached? Would the topic be so odd for any member of Congress meeting with any foreign national? Are we now going to demand that USG officials prove a negative?
More dangerous is the implicit charge that the DC Russian Ambassador is a member of the Russian secret intelligence community. If that charge isn’t based on evidence and is merely an assumption, why would they make such an assumption? I’m not talking here about truth (we know that many ambassadors (including US ambassadors, ie Chris Stevens) have served in a covert role), but operationally the assumption is that they don’t and that’s helpful in the personal safety of ambassadors and embassy staff.
Further ramping up the rhetoric is another idiot — The Hill – Dem senator: Russian hacking may have been ‘act of war’. Imagine if every country in the world leveled such a charge against the US for authentic and documented USG interference or meddling in their elections? Maybe if Russia did, we wouldn’t be here today to talk about this.
So, you really don’t get monthly checks from Putin?
So…you really don’t get monthly checks from a PermaGov-affiliated publication?
Careful with the snark, Booman.
Sometimes it comes around to bite you.
AG
So what if he talked about the election?
If he did, the perjury here is proven. Perjury is hard to prove, but Marie is arguing that we shouldn’t care even if it is proven.
In any case, when Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador in his Senate office, Putin was meeting with the former Ukrainian president in Volgograd to try to get assurances that the Manafort bribes were well hidden.
Harry Reid was begging Comey to move his ass, and the Democratic co-chairs of the House and Senate intel committees were releasing a public statement that they had been briefed on Russia’s efforts to influence the election. Meanwhile, someone named Michael Cohen was meeting in Prague with Russian intelligence officers to clean up the fallout from Manafort and Carter Page.
That’s the context here, AG.
Further context:
The U.S.has played the same dirty game for many years, and will continue to do so until it is no longer effective in the eyes of its intelligence services and their controllers…if indeed they any longer have controllers.
Partisan sniping is part of the game, as is making believe that “the other side” does it and whatever side one is on…the U.S., the Dems in this particular case…do not do it.
Truth?
That’s what’s for dinner.
The media eats it up and spits out lies in return.
Is there even any readily identifiable “truth” left in this system?
Seems not, to me.
Only those who stand as far outside of the system as they can possibly stand and still survive can afford to champion “the truth.”
Been that way for a good while.
Worldwide.
Bet on it.
AG
Sometimes I love your comments, and sometimes I love your scene in the Big Lebowski.
‘Nihilism in the defense of self-righteousness is no virtue.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
Never saw it.
I know some real out-theres. Lots of them. I don’t need much fiction. Reality trumps fiction now, anyway. If someone had tried to make a film about a character like Donald Trump…a real artist, making a serious film about the rise of such a person to the presidency of the U.S., number one the financing would not have been there.
“Too preposterous” the preposterous film execs would have said.
“No one will believe it.”
And number two, no one except Donald Trump could have imagined Donald Trump.
Too preposterous to be real.
Only…he is.
Fiction is either dead or it has reached parity with reality.
Not sure which, yet.
Get back to me on that…
AG
P.S. Just curious…which scene?
P.P.S. Your sig is a lie…no, let’s call it false truth, in honor of our own rulers.
Gandhi did not say that. It would be all over the web if he did. It is not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_29yvYpf4w
At least it’s an ethos.
Gotta ask, Booman…
Provenance?
Who wrote this?
Is it plausibly confirmable?
If so, by whom?
If not…why are you posting it?
Link, please?
AG
The source is Steele’s “dirty dossier.” The provenance remains unknown.
Source? And your point? That Russian officials, including Putin, violated Putin’s allege order that Kremlin and Russian government insiders are not to discuss the US election publicly or privately?
Are we now supposed to enforce Putin’s orders on Russians? Hell, we don’t even enforce US laws on high level USG officials.
Are US officials subject to a similar order never to discuss elections anywhere, any time, and with anybody? Yeah, right.
Yeah, so what? Same response I’d have if it were revealed that Senator Kerry met with the Russian Ambassador in ’08 or ’12 and words were said about the US election.
People talk. (And I’m assuming that members of Congress are people, although the evidence for that may be wanting.) Big deal.
How many Democratic members of Congress can claim never to have had conversations about US elections with Israelis? Providing that there is no evidence that state secrets, including covert operations to interfere with the US election, or moolah were passed during those conversations, why would the topic of the election be off-limits?
If the following is okay, and we can only imagine what may have said behind closed doors,
then it’s hypocritical to claim that words between anyone about a US election are off-limits.
You write:
Or…maybe we wound not need to talk about “this” because the U.S. would have stopped doing it…or at last doing it so brazenly…under the threat of massive retaliation.
AG