Al Franken sending Jeff Sessions letter “to have him explain himself”

“I have made a decision to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States”, Sessions said Thursday in a written statement as he opened a press conference in Washington.

Asked whether he believed Sessions had told the truth in his confirmation hearings, the president said “he probably did”. One of them was with Kislyak.

He is said to have received the Russian in his Senate office in September and also met him in July at a Heritage Foundation event at the Republican National Convention that was attended by about 50 ambassadors. “There’s no doubt about that”.

Senate Judiciary Democrats called Sessions’ recusal announcement Thursday “a welcome first step”, but added the nation’s top law enforcement officer “leaves many significant questions unanswered”. The real story is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information.

January 10, 2017: Dossier filled with unverified claims that Russian Federation has compromising intelligence about Trump is published. Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday that if criminal activity was uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation related to any alleged contact between Trump campaign officials and Russian Federation, then “Jeff Sessions, who is my dear friend, can not make this decision about Trump.” Sen.

During that hearing, Sessions claimed that he was “not aware of any of those activities”.

“If there were contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, they may be legitimate; they may be OK”.

Republican Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, said on Twitter that Mr Sessions “should clarify his testimony and recuse himself”. Reporter: “Should Sessions recuse himself from investigations into your campaign and Russian Federation?”

Instead, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter Friday calling Sessions back for another round of testimony before the committee. “I was asked on Morning Joe, if he needs to recuse himself as going forward”, he told Fox & Friends. These were some of the most meaningful discussions of my life, and Jeff’s writing them off like they didn’t even happen. “It is false”, Sessions said.

A spokeswoman for Sessions said that he does not have a “strong recollection” of what the men talked about, but that he took the meeting in his capacity as a senator rather than as a Trump adviser.

In removing himself, Sessions put acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente in charge of leading any election-related investigation.

Watch some of Schumer’s statement here.

As a point of contrast, McCaskill said, she had “no call from, or meeting with, the Russian ambassador”.

Sergey Kislyak, Russian Ambassador to the United States, in 2008. Franken said, “I would say at the very least this was extremely misleading”.

The previously undisclosed meetings once again raised the question of whether Trump’s campaign team colluded with Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the USA elections. Obama’s officials sought to secretly preserve evidence of Russian interference, a report says.