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ANALYSIS

Jeff Sessions' meetings with Russian ambassador a blow for Donald Trump's new glow

Paul McGeough

Washington: Scandals are cruel. Dogged by a trio of Russia-related rackets, Donald Trump learnt late on Wednesday local time that, inevitably, they control a president.

Last week the administration was in damage-control mode after disclosures that Trump's Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had been pressuring the FBI's two most senior leaders to "knock down" a report by The New York Times, which disclosed that communications intercepts had revealed an inordinate level of communication between the Trump campaign and people in Russia last year.

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In Washington parlance, that's called a cover-up.

But for much of Wednesday, the White House was indulging in a rare pleasure – basking in the glow of much favourable news reporting and commentary on Trump's well-received speech to the joint houses of Congress on Tuesday night.

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But that glow lasted only till 9.30 Wednesday evening, when coverage of Trump's "presidential" performance at the Capitol was knocked down by a Washington Post's blockbuster report: Trump's new Attorney General, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, had been sprung failing to disclose that he had met Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year.

Sessions had failed to disclose the meetings when asked during a bitter Senate confirmation hearing by which he was appointed as the country's top law officer.

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This is doubly embarrassing for Trump. On February 13 he sacked his recently appointed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, after The Post revealed that Flynn lied about his own communications with ambassador Kislyak in the transition between presidencies.

To lose his attorney-general so soon after, and for the same reason, would be mortifying.

In the wake of the Sessions revelation, continued Republican resistance to the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to investigate Trump's Russian connections was rated as political suicide.

One of the Sessions-Kislyak meetings might seem innocuous. It took place at the end of an event attended by about 50 ambassadors on the sidelines of the Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in mid-July. It was in the days before the first dump by WikiLeaks of emails which US intelligence agencies say were hacked from Democratic Party computers by Russian agents. They concluded it was a plot to give Trump an advantage over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

But the second meeting is definitely problematic – it took place in September at the senator's office, amidst intense public debate over investigations into what was being reported as the Russian hacking of the Democratic computers.

In the circumstances, it was risky for Sessions to take the meeting. Failing to disclose it was reckless.

At the time Sessions was a prominent figure in the Trump campaign apparatus as an adviser on foreign affairs and as a stump speaker for Trump. He also held a key post in the senate as a senior member of its powerful Armed Services Committee. All that made him red meat for a Russian envoy on the prowl.

As Trump's attorney-general, Sessions presides over the Justice Department and the FBI which is investigating the Trump campaign's links with Moscow. And he is stubbornly resisting Democratic Party demands that he recuse himself.

At Sessions' confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 10, Democratic Senator Al Franken asked him how he might respond if he was given evidence that anyone connected with the Trump campaign had been in touch with the Russian government during 2016.

"I'm not aware of any of those activities," Sessions replied. "I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians."

Around the same time, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy wrote to Sessions, asking: "Several of the President-elect's nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day?"

Sessions' reply had just a single word – "No".

More damaging for Sessions, is that the explanations for his failure to disclose the meetings, which were issued on his behalf, don't stack up.

He claims he was so busy meeting ambassadors from all over the world in the course of 2016 – more than 25 exchanges, including with envoys from Britain, Korea, Japan, Poland, India, China, Australia and Germany. And, er, um, Russia.

Further these meetings were in his capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee – so why would he think of them in the context of his role in the Trump campaign?

Funny that. The Washington Post did a ring-around of all 26 members of the Armed Services Committee, asking if any of them had felt a need to meet the Russian ambassador in the course of last year – 19 of the committee members replied and not a one of them had felt a need to seek out Kislyak.

Michael McFaul, the Stanford University professor who served as US ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama thought it was perfectly reasonable for Kislyak to pursue Sessions. But he told The Post: "The weird part is to conceal it. That was at the height of all the discussions of what Russia was doing during the election".

What McFaul seems to be saying is this: not even a very busy senator is likely to forget meeting a top-drawer ambassador, especially at a time when that ambassador's country is suspected of heinous conduct locally by American authorities. And especially when that conduct is suspected as being a deliberate leg-up to a presidential candidate for whom the very busy senator has turned policy summersaults.

When Sessions was interviewed at the German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum in March 2015, he didn't miss a beat in answering, as a good Republican should, when asked about the Russia menace – the US and Europe "have to unify" against Russia, he replied.

Fast forward to July 2016, and suddenly Sessions was pushing for a stronger relationship between Washington and the Kremlin – praising Trump's call for a better relationship with Vladimir Putin, Sessions told CNN's State of the Union:

"Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that's putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defence, and creating hostilities."

Asked late on Wednesday about the discrepancy between Sessions' answer during his confirmation and the disclosure of his meetings with Kislyak, which was attributed to unnamed Justice Department officials, Franken said:

"If it's true that Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.

"It is now clearer than ever that the attorney-general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately."

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