ABC News(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is recusing himself from any existing or future probes related to any campaigns for president, he said Thursday.
The move comes after it was reported Wednesday night that Sessions had two meetings with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in 2016 after he started supporting Donald Trump’s presidential bid and then failed to disclose the contacts during his confirmation hearing.
“Let me be clear, I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions told reporters. “And the idea that I was part of a ‘continuing exchange of information’ during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries to the Russian government are false.”
In a statement, Sessions said that over the last several weeks he has been meeting with “relevant senior career Department officials” over whether he should recuse himself and “having concluded those meetings Thursday, I have decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.”
Sessions held a press conference Thursday afternoon about the decision, saying that his reply to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., during the confirmation hearing “was honest and correct as I understood it at the time.”
“In the end, I have followed the right procedure just as I promised the committee I would,” he said of the decision to recuse himself.
“A proper decision, I believe, has been reached.”
A DOJ official said Wednesday night that Sessions had two contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — one with members of his staff on Sept. 8 (which was listed on his public schedule) and after giving a speech to the Heritage Foundation in July.
Sessions was asked about the nature of the September meeting Thursday and Sessions told reporters “I don’t recall any particular political discussions.”
The DOJ official said Wednesday that during the 2016 campaign ambassadors would make “superficial comments” about the election but it wasn’t the “substance of their discussion.”
Sessions became the first sitting senator to endorse Trump, in February 2016 and became the chair of his National Security Advisory Committee the next month.
A Department of Justice spokeswoman said in a statement Wednesday night saying that the meetings came as part of Sessions’ role at the time as a senator on the Armed Services Committee and that his answers during the confirmation process were not “misleading.”
During his confirmation hearing for attorney general in January, Sessions said that he “did not have any communications with the Russians.”
A White House official dismissed the story as “the latest attack against the Trump Administration by partisan Democrats.”
“I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign and those remarks are unbelievable to me and false and I don’t have anything else to say about that,” Sessions said Thursday.
Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.