Jeff Sessions Under Investigation For Yet Another Secret Meeting With Russian Official

As the Russia scandal and cover-up continue to drown this White House, CNN is now reporting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is under investigation for yet another meeting he may have had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

According to the report, Congressional investigators are looking into another possible meeting that took place in April 2016 – in the middle of the campaign – between Sessions and the Russian official.

More from the report:

Congressional investigators are examining whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions had an additional private meeting with Russia’s ambassador during the presidential campaign, according to Republican and Democratic Hill sources and intelligence officials briefed on the investigation.

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Investigators on the Hill are requesting additional information, including schedules from Sessions, a source with knowledge tells CNN. They are focusing on whether such a meeting took place April 27, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, where then-candidate Donald Trump was delivering his first major foreign policy address. Prior to the speech, then-Sen. Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak attended a small VIP reception with organizers, diplomats and others.

 

In addition to congressional investigators, the FBI is seeking to determine the extent of interactions the Trump campaign team may have had with Russia’s ambassador during the event as part of its broader counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the election. The FBI is looking into whether there was an additional private meeting at the Mayflower the same day, sources said.

The report comes months after Sessions found himself in hot water over two meetings he lied about taking with Russian officials during the campaign. It was quickly uncovered that Sessions did, in fact, have a pair of meetings with Kislyak during the campaign.

When Sessions was pressed on the whether there were any other meetings with Russian officials that he failed to disclose, the attorney general essentially said, “Nope.”

“I don’t believe so — you know, we meet a lot of people — I don’t believe so,” Sessions said in March, according to CNN.

If he had a third meeting with Kislyak last year, as the new reporting suggests, it would be not the first or second time the attorney general lied about his with meetings Russian officials – it would be the third.

For the nation’s top law enforcement officer, this type of behavior – lying about his meetings with a foreign state at a time when said foreign state was interfering in a U.S. presidential election – is unacceptable, and raises even more questions about why so many people around Trump are bending over backwards to conceal their contacts with Russia.

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.