Five Ways Democrats Will Try to Trip Up Sessions

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will appear Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the most eagerly anticipated congressional testimony since … Thursday.

Democrats think Sessions has a lot of explaining to do after last week’s performance by former FBI Director James Comey, who accused the attorney general of not protecting him from meeting alone with President Donald Trump. Comey also insinuated that Sessions could not be part of the discussions about the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election because of something that would be “problematic.”

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Comey said he could not explain in public, but CNN later reported that he told senators privately that he was referring to a possible meeting that Sessions might have had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Here are five questions that the hearing may — or may not — answer.

1.) How much will Sessions say during his appearance?
Democrats have lots of questions, but it is not clear whether Sessions will feel he can answer all of them. Trump may assert executive privilege to keep Sessions from discussing certain private conversations.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Monday declined to say whether the administration would assert the privilege.

“It depends on the scope of the questions,” he said. “At this point, it would be premature to get into hypotheticals.”

2.) Will Democrats be any more satisfied by hearing a denial directly from the attorney general’s mouth about the Kislyak-Mayflower storyline than they have been from surrogates?
CNN reported that intercepted communications showed Russians discussing that the meeting occurred in April 2016 as Trump was delivering a foreign-policy speech. Sessions and Kislyak both attended the speech, but a Justice Department spokeswoman has said several times that they met never met.

A source familiar with the matter told LifeZette last week that Sessions and Kislyak did not talk during the event.

“What were his contacts, if any, with Russian officials during the period of the campaign?”

Democrats are not convinced.

“What were his contacts, if any, with Russian officials during the period of the campaign?” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats, asked on CNN. “I think that’s certainly a question that we need to ask.”

So the question is, will King and Democrats in the Senate take Sessions at his word if he testifies under oath that he did not meet with Kislyak during the speech? If not, it is hard to see what Sessions can accomplish by testifying. It puts him in the impossible position of having to prove a negative.

3.) Will the media accurately describe the previous meetings Sessions has acknowledged with Kislyak?
The reason this even is an issue is because Sessions, at his confirmation hearing, testified that he did not have “communications with the Russians” during the campaign. Later, he acknowledged two meetings last year but said they were in the context of his duties as a U.S. senator and not — as the question from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) framed it — in his role as a campaign surrogate.

The first meeting occurred in Sessions’ Senate office. But the second “meeting,” offered to show a pattern, was hardly a meeting in the conventional sense of the world. Sessions delivered that keynote speech at a Heritage Foundation event outside the Republican National Convention in July to an audience that included dozens of foreign ambassadors.

According to witnesses, Sessions chatted with several ambassadors, including Kislyak, as he walked through the room.

CNN and other news organizations rarely provide that description, choosing instead to merely reference the two undisclosed “meetings” that Sessions had.

4.) What will Sessions say about Comey’s firing?
It is sure to come up. King told CNN that he what he is “interested in is what role did he play, again, in the Comey firing.”

Sessions signed off on a memo by his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, outlining Comey’s violations of Justice Department protocol in his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. He wrote a short letter recommending Comey’s dismissal.

Trump later told NBC News anchor Lester Holt, however, that he was upset by the way Comey was handling the counterintelligence investigation into Russian election meddling. That has Democrats suggesting that it was a violation of the commitment Sessions made to recuse himself from the Russia investigation because of his role on the Trump campaign.

“Attorney General Sessions has an explanation he needs to give,” Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)  told CNN on Monday.

5.) What will Sessions say about allegations that he failed to protect Comey from interference by Trump?
The fired FBI director testified last week that he was uncomfortable when Trump asked him to stay behind after a meeting at the Oval Office on Feb 14. Trump asked everyone else, including Sessions, to leave.

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That is when Trump, according to Comey, asked him to back off of the FBI’s investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Comey also testified that he later asked Sessions not to let Trump meet alone with him again, but that the attorney general did not respond.

The Justice Department pushed back against that characterization, saying Sessions told Comey he needed to be careful about following appropriate policies.

On Tuesday, Sessions will have a chance to describe the interaction in his own words, under oath.