The announcement comes a day after The Washington Post revealed that Jeff Sessions twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and did not disclose that fact to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Democrats had been calling for weeks for Sessions to step away from the investigation, though he had resisted pressures to do so.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is not the only member of President Trump’s campaign who spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a diplomacy conference connected to the Republican National Convention in July. At least two more members of the Trump campaign’s national security officials also spoke with Kislyak at the event, and several more Trump national security advisers were in attendance.
It's unknown what the Trump campaign officials who spoke with the ambassador – J.D. Gordon and Carter Page – discussed with him. Those who took part in the events in Cleveland said it is not unusual for presidential campaign teams to interact with diplomats.
However, the newly-revealed communications further contradict months of repeated denials by Trump officials that his campaign had contact with officials representing the Russian government.
— Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
The Russian ambassador who met with then Sen. Jeff Sessions last year has left a path of repeated involvement in the U.S. presidential election campaign.
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s staff became embroiled in an election monitoring brouhaha last fall, and President Obama expelled 35 members of Kislyak’s team late last year for their alleged interference in the election campaign to help Donald Trump.
Current and former US intelligence officials have described Kislyak as a top spy and recruiter of spies, a notion that Russian officials have dismissed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that "nobody has heard a single statement from US intelligence agencies' representatives regarding our ambassador," and attacked the "depersonalized assumptions of the media that are constantly trying to blow this situation out of proportion."
The calls for a special prosecutor will avalanche now. Republicans in the Senate who aren’t from deep-red states are going to join the call for a special prosecutor, as Ohio’s Rob Portman did shortly after Schumer spoke. Sessions will resist, and the White House will resist, but eventually, the untenable nature of their position will show up in the poll numbers, and they’ll relent.
Sessions will have to relent to have a chance of keeping his job. But this just shows why it was so corrupt for Trump to name him in the first place. It’s becoming clearer and clearer why Trump wanted an attorney general he could trust not to investigate him.