NEW: Reuters: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people https://t.co/xD3CCBtCuh
— Evan Rosenfeld (@Evan_Rosenfeld) March 18, 2018
… Or maybe his memory is just failing, selectively:
… Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he “pushed back” against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team…
Sessions, through Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, declined to comment beyond his prior testimony. The special counsel’s office also declined to comment. Spokeswomen for the Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did not comment.
Reuters was unable to determine whether Mueller is probing discrepancies in accounts of the March 2016 meeting.
The three accounts, which have not been reported, raise new questions about Sessions’ testimony regarding contacts with Russia during the campaign.
Sessions previously failed to disclose to Congress meetings he had with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and testified in October that he was not aware of any campaign representatives communicating with Russians…
Legal experts expressed mixed views about the significance of the contradictions cited by the three sources.
Sessions could argue he misremembered events or perceived his response in a different way, making any contradictions unintentional, some experts said….
NYMag adds:
… Sessions has been slippery — to put it generously — about Russia before. During his confirmation hearings last year, he said that he was not aware of any meetings between Trump campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government, neglecting to mention two meetings he had Sergei Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sessions claimed that he had met with Kislyak in his capacity as a U.S. Senator, not as a Trump surrogate. He later claimed that the meetings in question did not involve campaign-related issues — a version of events contradicted by Kislyak himself.
Sessions’s duplicitousness led to his fateful recusal from the Russia investigation, paving the way for Mueller’s appointment.
But remember, when it comes to firing political enemies of President Trump, the attorney general is deeply concerned about honesty.
Sidebar from Vox: “Jeff Sessions may have violated his recusal pledge when he fired Andrew McCabe”