RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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all his properties are slowing up....people ain't giving him their money anymore
Go research that espionage case from like 4-5 years ago.Carter page somehow thinks if he didn't know what he was doing was illegal then he did nothing wrong.
It reminds me of the Chapelle stand up sketch of when his white friend told the cop "I'm sorry I didn't know I couldnt do that." and the cop let him go.
That's not how the FBI works
The Russians ran an espionage train on this dude and he didn't even realize it. Or just refuses to believe it because the Russian contacts probably told him your doing nothing wrong don't worry.
He's naive to what's been going on and still going on around him.
Evgeny Buryakov - Wikipedia
he was ALREADY a pawn in a former espionage case
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe
How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe
How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe
Yo. What the entire fukk?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?
COMEY'S DECISION TO ANNOUNCE THE RE-OPEN THE CLINTON PROBE WAS fukkING RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA!!!!!
How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe
In the midst of the 2016 presidential primary season, the FBI received a purported Russian intelligence document describing a tacit understanding between the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Justice Department over the inquiry into whether she intentionally revealed classified information through her use of a private email server.
The Russian document mentioned a supposed email describing how then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch had privately assured someone in the Clinton campaign that the email investigation would not push too deeply into the matter — a conversation that if made public would cast doubt on the inquiry’s integrity.
Current and former officials have said that document played a significant role in the July decision by then-FBI Director James B. Comey to announce on his own, without Justice Department involvement, that the investigation was over. That public announcement — in which he criticized Clinton and made extensive comments about the evidence — set in motion a chain of other FBI moves that Democrats now say helped Trump win the presidential election.
But according to the FBI’s own assessment, the document was bad intelligence — and according to people familiar with its contents, possibly even a fake sent to confuse the bureau. The Americans mentioned in the Russian document insist they do not know each other, do not speak to each other and never had any conversations remotely like the ones described in the document. Investigators have long doubted its veracity, and by August the FBI had concluded it was unreliable.
The document, obtained by the FBI, was a piece of purported analysis by Russian intelligence, the people said. It referred to an email supposedly written by the then-chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and sent to Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, an organization founded by billionaire George Soros and dedicated to promoting democracy.
From Clinton emails to alleged Russian meddling in election: The events leading up to Comey’s firing]
In the supposed email, Wasserman Schultz claimed Lynch had been in private communication with a senior Clinton campaign staffer named Amanda Renteria during the campaign. The document indicated Lynch had told Renteria that she would not let the FBI investigation into Clinton go too far, according to people familiar with it.
Current and former officials have argued that the secret document gave Comey good reason to take the extraordinary step over the summer of announcing the findings of the Clinton investigation himself without Justice Department involvement.
Comey had little choice, these people have said, because he feared that if Lynch announced no charges against Clinton, and then the secret document leaked, the legitimacy of the entire case would be questioned.
From the moment the bureau received the document from a source in early March 2016, its veracity was the subject of an internal debate at the FBI. Several people familiar with the matter said the bureau’s doubts about the document hardened in August when officials became more certain that there was nothing to substantiate the claims in the Russian document. FBI officials knew the bureau never had the underlying email with the explosive allegation, if it ever existed.
Yet senior officials at the bureau continued to rely on the document before and after the election as part of their justification for how they handled the case.
FBI director says he feels ‘mildly nauseous’ about possibility he affected election, but has no regrets]
“It was a very powerful factor in the decision to go forward in July with the statement that there shouldn’t be a prosecution,” said a person familiar with the matter. “The point is that the bureau picked up hacked material that hadn’t been dumped by the bad guys [the Russians] involving Lynch. And that would have pulled the rug out of any authoritative announcement.”
Other people familiar with the document disagree sharply, saying such claims are disingenuous because the FBI has known for a long time that the Russian intelligence document is unreliable and based on multiple layers of hearsay.
“It didn’t mean anything to the investigation until after [senior FBI officials] had to defend themselves,” said one person familiar with the matter. “Then they decided it was important. But it’s junk, and they already knew that.”
An FBI spokesman declined to comment. Comey did not respond to requests for comment.
The people familiar with the Russian document spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss its contents. No one familiar with it asked The Post to withhold details about its origins to safeguard the source.
Several of them said they were concerned that revealing details now about the document could be perceived as an effort to justify Trump’s decision to fire Comey, but they argued that the document and Comey’s firing are distinct issues. Most of the people familiar with the document disagree strongly with the decision to fire the director, but they also criticized current and former officials who have privately cited the document as an important factor in the decisions made by Comey and other senior FBI officials. Comey told lawmakers he would discuss it with them only in a classified session.
Email not obtained
After the bureau first received the document, it attempted to use the source to obtain the referenced email but could not do so, these people said. The source that provided the document, they said, had previously supplied other information that the FBI was also unable to corroborate.
While it was conducting the Clinton email investigation, the FBI did not interview anyone mentioned in the Russian document about its claims. At the time, FBI agents were probing numerous hacking cases involving Democrats and other groups, but they never found an email like the one described in the document, these people said.
Then on July 5, Comey decided to announce on his own — without telling Lynch ahead of time — that he was closing the Clinton email case without recommending charges against anyone. Aides to Comey said he decided to act alone after Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton for nearly a half-hour on an airport tarmac in Phoenix about a week earlier — and have since said privately the Russian document was also a factor in that decision.
[The Clinton email probe: Questions and answers]
The appearance of possible conflict arising from the Phoenix meeting led FBI leadership to want to show it had reached the decision independently, without political interference from the Justice Department.
About a month after Comey’s announcement, FBI officials asked to meet privately with the attorney general. At the meeting, they told Lynch about a foreign source suggesting she had told Renteria that Clinton did not have to worry about the email probe, because she would keep the FBI in check, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Just so you know, I don’t know this person and have never communicated with her,’’ Lynch told the FBI officials, according to a person familiar with the discussion. The FBI officials assured her the conversation was not a formal interview and said the document “didn’t have investigative value,’’ the person said.
Nevertheless, the officials said, they wanted to give the attorney general what is sometimes referred to as a “defensive briefing’’ — advising someone of a potential intelligence issue that could come up at some future point.
The agents never mentioned Wasserman Schultz to Lynch but told her there was some uncertainty surrounding the information because of “possible translation issues,” according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Lynch told them they were welcome to speak to her staff and to conduct a formal interview of her, the person said. The FBI declined both offers.
‘I’ve never heard of him’
Renteria, a California Democrat, first heard of the Russian document and its description of her role when a Post reporter called her.
“Wow, that’s kind of weird and out of left field,’’ she said. “I don’t know Loretta Lynch, the attorney general. I haven’t spoken to her.’’
Renteria said she did know a California woman by the same name who specializes in utility issues. The Loretta Lynch in California is a lawyer who once did campaign work for the Clintons decades ago involving the Whitewater investigation. Bloggers and others have previously confused the two women, including during Lynch’s nomination to be attorney general.
Wasserman Schultz and Benardo, the alleged emailers, were also perplexed by the Russian document’s claims.
Wasserman Schultz said: “Not only do I not know him — I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know who this is. There’s no truth to this whatsoever. I have never sent an email remotely like what you’re describing.’’
She added that she had met Lynch, the former attorney general, once briefly at a dinner function.
Benardo said of Wasserman Schultz: “I’ve never met her. I’ve only read about her.”
“I’ve never in my lifetime received any correspondence of any variety — correspondence, fax, telephone, from Debbie Wasserman Schultz,’’ he said. “If such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.’’
As for Renteria, Wasserman Schultz said she knew who she was from past political work but had “virtually no interaction” with her during the 2016 campaign. “I was definitely in the same room as her on more than one occasion, but we did not interact, and no email exchange during the campaign, or ever,’’ she said.
When asked, the individuals named in the document struggled to fathom why their identities would have been woven together in a document describing communications they said never happened. But others recognized the dim outlines of a conspiracy theory that would be less surprising in Russia, where Soros — the founder of the organization Benardo works for — and Clinton are both regarded as political enemies of the Kremlin.
“The idea that Russians would tell a story in which the Clinton campaign, Soros and even an Obama administration official are connected — that Russians might tell such a story, that is not at all surprising,” said Matt Rojansky, a Russia expert and director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center. “Because that is part of the Kremlin worldview.”
The secret intelligence document has attracted so much attention recently that Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Comey about it during the director’s final public appearance in Congress as FBI director before he was fired.
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Comey said that he had spoken with the heads of the congressional intelligence committees about the document privately but that it was too sensitive to discuss it in public.
“The subject is classified, and in an appropriate forum I’d be happy to brief you on it,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But I can’t do it in an open hearing.”
No such briefing occurred before he was fired.
Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @lotuseater80 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @AZBeauty @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
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str8cashhomie87
All Star
RUSSIAN SPIES OPENLY DISCUSSED TARGETING HILLARY VIA TRUMP ASSOCIATES!!!
Top Russian Officials Discussed How to Influence Trump Aides Last Summer
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZOMAY 24, 2017
Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last July. Win McNamee/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — American spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald J. Trump through his advisers, according to three current and former American officials familiar with the intelligence.
The conversations focused on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman at the time, and Michael T. Flynn, a retired general who was advising Mr. Trump, the officials said. Both men had indirect ties to Russian officials, who appeared confident that each could be used to help shape Mr. Trump’s opinions on Russia.
Some Russians boasted about how well they knew Mr. Flynn. Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Mr. Manafort.
The intelligence was among the clues — which also included information about direct communications between Mr. Trump’s advisers and Russian officials — that American officials received last year as they began investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates were assisting Moscow in the effort. Details of the conversations, some of which have not been previously reported, add to an increasing understanding of the alarm inside the American government last year about the Russian disruption campaign.
The information collected last summer was considered credible enough for intelligence agencies to pass to the F.B.I., which during that period opened a counterintelligence investigation that is ongoing. It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn. Both have denied any collusion with the Russian government on the campaign to disrupt the election.
John O. Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., testified Tuesday about a tense period last year when he came to believe that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was trying to steer the outcome of the election. He said he saw intelligencesuggesting that Russia wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help in that effort. He spoke vaguely about contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, without giving names, saying they “raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
Whether the Russians worked directly with any Trump advisers is one of the central questions that federal investigators, now led by Robert S. Mueller III, the newly appointed special counsel, are seeking to answer. President Trump, for his part, has dismissed talk of Russian interference in the election as “fake news,” insisting there was no contact between his campaign and Russian officials.
The White House, F.B.I. and C.I.A. declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Mr. Manafort. Mr. Flynn’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The current and former officials agreed to discuss the intelligence only on the condition of anonymity because much of it remains highly classified, and they could be prosecuted for disclosing it.
Last week, CNN reported about intercepted phone calls during which Russian officials were bragging about ties to Mr. Flynn and discussing ways to wield influence over him.
In his congressional testimony, Mr. Brennan discussed the broad outlines of the intelligence, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials.
“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election. And they were very aggressive,” Mr. Brennan said. Still, he said, even at the end of the Obama administration he had “unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons, involved in the campaign or not, to work on their behalf again either in a witting or unwitting fashion.”
Mr. Brennan’s testimony offered the fullest public account to date of how American intelligence agencies first came to fear that Mr. Trump’s campaign might be aiding Russia’s attack on the election.
By early summer, American intelligence officials already were fairly certain that it was Russian hackers who had stolen tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That in itself was not viewed as particularly extraordinary by the Americans — foreign spies had hacked previous campaigns, and the United States does the same in elections around the world, officials said. The view on the inside was that collecting information, even through hacking, is what spies do.
But the concerns began to grow when intelligence began trickling in about Russian officials weighing whether they should release stolen emails and other information to shape American opinion — to, in essence, weaponize the materials stolen by hackers.
An unclassified report by American intelligence agencies released in January stated that Mr. Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.”
Before taking the helm of the Trump campaign last May, Mr. Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations and people in Ukraine, including Mr. Yanukovych, the former president. Mr. Yanukovych was a close ally of Mr. Putin.
Mr. Manafort’s links to Ukraine led to his departure from the Trump campaign in August, after his name surfaced in secret ledgers showing millions in undisclosed cash payments from Mr. Yanukovych’s political party.
The Russian government views Ukraine as a buffer against the eastward expansion of NATO, and has supported separatists in their yearslong fight against the struggling democratic government in Kiev.
Mr. Flynn’s ties to Russian officials stretch back to his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led from 2012 to 2014. There, he began pressing for the United States to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight against Islamist militants, and even spent a day in Moscow at the headquarters of the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, in 2013.
He continued to insist that Russia could be an ally even after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea the following year, and Obama administration officials have said that contributed to their decision to push him out of the D.I.A.
But in private life, Mr. Flynn cultivated even closer ties to Russia. In 2015, he earnedmore than $65,000 from companies linked to Russia, including a cargo airline implicated in a bribery scheme involving Russian officials at the United Nations, and an American branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia’s intelligence services.
The biggest payment, though, came from RT, the Kremlin-financed news network. It paid Mr. Flynn $45,000 to give a speech in Moscow, where he also attended the network’s lavish anniversary dinner. There, he was photographed sitting next to Mr. Putin.
A senior lawmaker said on Monday that Mr. Flynn misled Pentagon investigators about how he was paid for the Moscow trip. He also failed to disclose the source of that income on a security form he was required to complete before joining the White House, according to congressional investigators.
American officials have also said there were multiple telephone calls between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, on Dec. 29, beginning shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 people suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions.
American intelligence agencies routinely tap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, officials have said.
But after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of the calls, Mr. Flynn was fired as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after a tumultuous 25 days in office.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @lotuseater80 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @AZBeauty @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
str8cashhomie87
All Star
FIRST ON CNN
Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not disclose Russia meetings in a security clearance form, DOJ tells CNN
First on CNN: AG Sessions did not disclose meetings with Russian officials, DOJ says
By Manu Raju and Evan Perez, CNN
Updated 6:00 PM ET, Wed May 24, 2017
Sources: Russians bragged about using Flynn 03:06
Story highlights
Washington (CNN)Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not disclose meetings he had last year with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance, the Justice Department told CNN Wednesday.
- Sessions met with Russian ambassador at least twice in 2016
- Those meetings were not noted on his security clearance form
Sessions, who met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least two times last year, didn't note those interactions on the form, which requires him to list "any contact" he or his family had with a "foreign government" or its "representatives" over the past seven years, officials said.
The new information from the Justice Department is the latest example of Sessions failing to disclose contacts he had with Russian officials. He has come under withering criticism from Democrats following revelations that he did not disclose the same contacts with Kislyak during his Senate confirmation hearings earlier this year.
Sessions initially listed a year's worth of meetings with foreign officials on the security clearance form, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores. But she says he and his staff were then told by an FBI employee who assisted in filling out the form, known as the SF-86, that he didn't need to list dozens of meetings with foreign ambassadors that happened in his capacity as a senator.
The FBI declined to comment for this story.
First on CNN: Grassley may call on Mueller over documents request
A legal expert who regularly assists officials in filling out the form disagrees with the Justice Department's explanation, suggesting that Sessions should have disclosed the meetings.
"My interpretation is that a member of Congress would still have to reveal the appropriate foreign government contacts notwithstanding it was on official business," said Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney who specializes in national security law.
Zaid added that in a similar circumstance he advised a member of Congress to list all foreign contacts -- including those made during official US government business.
To obtain a security clearance, a federal official is not required to list the meetings if they were part of a foreign conference he or she attended while conducting government business. Sessions' meetings, however, do not appear to be tied to foreign conferences.
The omission comes after problems that Trump adviser Jared Kushner and the President's ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn, have had on their own security forms. Kushner prematurely submitted his SF-86 form without listing foreign contacts and had to notify the FBI the next day that he was willing to provide the information. Flynn is under investigation for not properly disclosing payments linked to Russia for his foreign trips.
Lawmakers have raised questions about Sessions' meetings with Russian officials while he played a prominent role in the Trump campaign -- meetings that he only disclosed after The Washington Post revealed them. He is under scrutiny as well for his role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey despite his recusal from the Russia investigation.
Sessions could be a witness before the House and Senate intelligence panels as part of their ongoing probes into potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia, lawmakers said. And attendees at a classified House briefing last week with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, said Sessions' name was raised when lawmakers asked if the attorney general had a role in the Comey firing. Rosenstein, sources said, declined to comment, but noted that such matters could be investigated by Robert Mueller, the recently named special counsel in the Russia probe.
Manafort turns over hundreds of pages of documents to Senate intel
Flores said the "recommendation to remove Comey was a personnel decision based on concerns about the effectiveness of his leadership" at the bureau and that it had "nothing to do with the substance of the investigation." Since the firing, President Donald Trump acknowledged in an interview with NBC News that the Russia investigation was on his mind as he dismissed Comey.
Sessions' meetings with Kislyak have become a major political problem for the new attorney general.
At his confirmation hearing January 10, Sessions testified that he "did not have communications" with the Russians during the campaign. He made the same assertion in an official questionnaire.
He was sworn in as attorney general February 9 and subsequently received a security clearance, even though he didn't mention the Kislyak meetings on his paperwork.
The Washington Post reported March 1 that Sessions had two undisclosed meetings with Kislyak during the campaign, which brought Sessions into the widening Russia scandal for the first time.
Sessions recused himself from overseeing the FBI's Russia investigation one day later.
"Let me be clear," Sessions said before announcing his recusal, "I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign."
Trump's supporters aren't abandoning him in this Pennsylvania town
He then amended his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony to note the two reported interactions he had with Kislyak. In the amended testimony, the former Alabama senator said he spoke "briefly" in July 2016 to the Russian ambassador during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He also said that he spoke with the Russian ambassador in September 2016 in his Senate office with his staff members. He said he did not initially list those meetings because he did not think they were relevant to the questions asked during the confirmation proceedings.
He added: "I do not recall any discussions with the Russian ambassador or any other representative of the Russian government, regarding the political campaign on these occasions or any other occasion."
Lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees say it is possible that Sessions could be questioned about those meetings and his role in the campaign -- as well as the circumstances around the Comey firing.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told CNN in an April 28 interview, "I'd be happy if they brought him before the committee and had him testify."
"Look, there are a lot of questions about Jeff Sessions," the New York Democrat said of his former colleague. "That's why I called on him to resign."
CNN's Brian Rokus and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
choc_cardigan
Squad
This Russian cyber attack will be the stuff of legends when it all drops.
SESSIONS LIED ON HIS SECURITY CLEARANCE AND DID NOT DISCLOSE MEETINGS!!!
First on CNN: AG Sessions did not disclose meetings with Russian officials, DOJ says
Sources: Russians bragged about using Flynn 03:06
Washington (CNN)Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not disclose meetings he had last year with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance, the Justice Department told CNN Wednesday.
Sessions, who met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least two times last year, didn't note those interactions on the form, which requires him to list "any contact" he or his family had with a "foreign government" or its "representatives" over the past seven years, officials said.
The new information from the Justice Department is the latest example of Sessions failing to disclose contacts he had with Russian officials. He has come under withering criticism from Democrats following revelations that he did not disclose the same contacts with Kislyak during his Senate confirmation hearings earlier this year.
Sessions initially listed a year's worth of meetings with foreign officials on the security clearance form, according to Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores. But she says he and his staff were then told by an FBI employee who assisted in filling out the form, known as the SF-86, that he didn't need to list dozens of meetings with foreign ambassadors that happened in his capacity as a senator.
The FBI declined to comment for this story.
A legal expert who regularly assists officials in filling out the form disagrees with the Justice Department's explanation, suggesting that Sessions should have disclosed the meetings.
"My interpretation is that a member of Congress would still have to reveal the appropriate foreign government contacts notwithstanding it was on official business," said Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney who specializes in national security law.
Zaid added that in a similar circumstance he advised a member of Congress to list all foreign contacts -- including those made during official US government business.
To obtain a security clearance, a federal official is not required to list the meetings if they were part of a foreign conference he or she attended while conducting government business. Sessions' meetings, however, do not appear to be tied to foreign conferences.
The omission comes after problems that Trump adviser Jared Kushner and the President's ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn, have had on their own security forms. Kushner prematurely submitted his SF-86 form without listing foreign contacts and had to notify the FBI the next day that he was willing to provide the information. Flynn is under investigation for not properly disclosing payments linked to Russia for his foreign trips.
Lawmakers have raised questions about Sessions' meetings with Russian officials while he played a prominent role in the Trump campaign -- meetings that he only disclosed after The Washington Post revealed them. He is under scrutiny as well for his role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey despite his recusal from the Russia investigation.
Sessions could be a witness before the House and Senate intelligence panels as part of their ongoing probes into potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia, lawmakers said. And attendees at a classified House briefing last week with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, said Sessions' name was raised when lawmakers asked if the attorney general had a role in the Comey firing. Rosenstein, sources said, declined to comment, but noted that such matters could be investigated by Robert Mueller, the recently named special counsel in the Russia probe.
Flores said the "recommendation to remove Comey was a personnel decision based on concerns about the effectiveness of his leadership" at the bureau and that it had "nothing to do with the substance of the investigation." Since the firing, President Donald Trump acknowledged in an interview with NBC News that the Russia investigation was on his mind as he dismissed Comey.
Sessions' meetings with Kislyak have become a major political problem for the new attorney general.
At his confirmation hearing January 10, Sessions testified that he "did not have communications" with the Russians during the campaign. He made the same assertion in an official questionnaire.
He was sworn in as attorney general February 9 and subsequently received a security clearance, even though he didn't mention the Kislyak meetings on his paperwork.
The Washington Post reported March 1 that Sessions had two undisclosed meetings with Kislyak during the campaign, which brought Sessions into the widening Russia scandal for the first time.
Sessions recused himself from overseeing the FBI's Russia investigation one day later.
"Let me be clear," Sessions said before announcing his recusal, "I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign."
He then amended his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony to note the two reported interactions he had with Kislyak. In the amended testimony, the former Alabama senator said he spoke "briefly" in July 2016 to the Russian ambassador during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He also said that he spoke with the Russian ambassador in September 2016 in his Senate office with his staff members. He said he did not initially list those meetings because he did not think they were relevant to the questions asked during the confirmation proceedings.
He added: "I do not recall any discussions with the Russian ambassador or any other representative of the Russian government, regarding the political campaign on these occasions or any other occasion."
Lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees say it is possible that Sessions could be questioned about those meetings and his role in the campaign -- as well as the circumstances around the Comey firing.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told CNN in an April 28 interview, "I'd be happy if they brought him before the committee and had him testify."
"Look, there are a lot of questions about Jeff Sessions," the New York Democrat said of his former colleague. "That's why I called on him to resign."
CNN's Brian Rokus and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
@DonKnock @The Black Panther @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @lotuseater80 @Cali_livin @Menelik II @AZBeauty @Hogan in the Wolfpac @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Ss4gogeta0 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Call Me James @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @duckbutta @TheDarceKnight @Ed MOTHERfukkING G
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Word, fukk Beauregard. Legit. LOCK HIM UP.