WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing fresh questions about his Russian contacts during the election campaign and his role in the firing of James Comey, will be interrogated in a public hearing by former Senate colleagues today.
The appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee comes days after former FBI Director Comey told lawmakers that the bureau had expected Sessions to recuse himself weeks before he did from an investigation into contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russia during the 2016 election.
Sessions, a close campaign adviser to Donald Trump and the first senator to endorse him, stepped aside from the investigation in early March after acknowledging that he had spoken twice in the months before the election with the Russian ambassador to the United States. He said under oath at his January confirmation hearing that he had not met with Russians during the campaign.
Since then, lawmakers have raised questions about a possible third meeting at a Washington hotel, though the Justice Department has said that did not happen.
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Sessions on Saturday said he would appear before the Intelligence Committee, which has been conducting its own investigation into Russian contacts with the Trump campaign. There had been some question as to whether the hearing would be open to the public, but the Justice Department said Monday that Sessions requested it be so because he "believes it is important for the American people to hear the truth directly from him."
The committee shortly after said the hearing would be open.
Senate aides, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that there were no plans for Sessions to provide additional testimony in private.
Sessions is likely to be asked about his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and whether there were more encounters that should have been made public. And he can expect questions about his involvement in Comey's May 9 firing, the circumstances surrounding his decision to recuse himself from the FBI's investigation, and whether any of his actions -- such as interviewing candidates for the FBI director position or meeting with Trump about Comey -- violated his recusal pledge.
Asked Monday whether the White House thought Sessions should invoke executive privilege to avoid answering questions about his conversations with Trump, presidential spokesman Sean Spicer replied, "It depends on the scope of the questions. To get into a hypothetical at this point would be premature."
He did not explicitly endorse Sessions' appearance, saying only, "We're aware of it, and we'll go from there."
Democratic lawmakers were skeptical that Sessions would divulge any explosive new details, especially because of the attorney general's option of asserting executive privilege regarding any questions about conversations with the president.
But they expressed hopes that the hearing offers a chance to at least get Sessions on the record as either answering or dodging answers about pivotal events related to Comey and the FBI's investigation.
"There are many unanswered and troubling questions, so the attorney general needs to be forthcoming," said Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
Comey made an appearance before the same Senate panel last week, with some key moments centered on Sessions.
Comey said Trump told Sessions and other administration officials to leave the room before Trump asked him in February to drop a probe into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's contacts with Russia.
"'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,'" Comey quoted Trump as saying. "'He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.'"
After the meeting, Comey said he told Sessions that he did not want to be alone again with Trump and "it can't happen that you get kicked out of the room and the president talks to me."
Comey said Sessions responded with, essentially, a shrug.
"I have a recollection of him just kind of looking at me," Comey testified. "I kind of got -- his body language gave me the sense like, 'What am I going to do?' ... He didn't say anything."
Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman, disputed that account and said Sessions replied to Comey and said he "wanted to ensure that he and his FBI staff were following proper communications protocol with the White House."
Trump's personal lawyer also challenged Comey's account, saying the president never asked for the investigation to be dropped.
The former FBI director also testified that he and the agency had believed that Sessions was "inevitably going to recuse" for reasons he said he could not elaborate on.
"We also were aware of facts that I can't discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic," Comey said.
White House frustrations with the Justice Department over the Russia investigation spilled into public view last week when Trump on Twitter criticized the legal strategy in defending his proposed travel ban.
Spicer declined to say then that Sessions enjoyed Trump's confidence, though spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later in the week that the president had confidence "in all of his Cabinet."
Though the Justice Department maintains that it has fully disclosed the extent of Sessions' foreign contacts last year, lawmakers have continued to press him for answers about an April 2016 event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where both Sessions and Kislyak attended a foreign policy speech by Trump.
Senate Democrats have raised the possibility that Sessions and Kislyak could have met there, though Justice Department officials say there were no private encounters or side meetings.
Lawmakers, including Al Franken of Minnesota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, have asked the FBI to investigate and to determine whether Sessions committed perjury when he denied having had meetings with Russians.
Sessions had originally been scheduled to make separate appearances today before subcommittees of the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Now he is sending Rod Rosenstein, his deputy, to those hearings instead.
Separately, Senate Republicans and Democrats reached agreement late Monday on a new package of sanctions against Russia.
Top lawmakers on two committees -- Banking and Foreign Relations -- announced the deal, which would require a congressional review if a president attempts to ease or end current penalties.
The plan also calls for strengthening current sanctions and imposing new ones on corrupt Russian operatives, those involved in human-rights abuses and those supplying weapons to the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Penalties also would be slapped on those responsible for malicious cyberactivity on behalf of the Russian government.
The batch of sanctions would be added to a bill imposing penalties on Iran that the Senate is currently debating.
A procedural vote on the Russia sanctions is expected Wednesday.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Deb Riechmann and Richard Lardner of The Associated Press; by Sari Horwitz, Karoun Demirjian, Ed O'Keefe and Adam Entous of The Washington Post; and by Chris Strohm, Steven T. Dennis and Justin Sink of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/13/2017