The Democratic leader says the attorney general’s recusal doesn’t go far enough.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions during her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill, on Mar. 2, 2017, in Washington, D.C. (AARON P. BERNSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she is unsatisfied with Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to recuse himself from any inquiry into ties between Russia and President Donald Trump's campaign, calling his explanation for why he had initially denied meeting with the Russian ambassador "beyond naive."
"This recusal is an admission something was wrong," she said.
During confirmation hearings in January, while he was still a Senator representing Alabama, Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee he had not had interactions with a representative of the Russian government while acting as a surrogate for then-candidate Trump during the presidential campaign.
On Thursday Sessions denied misleading his former Senate colleagues in his testimony, saying two meetings he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were part of his normal course of his duties as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Washington Post reported that 20 out of 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said they did not meet with the Russian Ambassador in 2016; the six remaining members did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.
Pelosi she was troubled that Sessions was just the latest in a growing list of members of Trump's inner circle to have contacts with the Kremlin. Beyond Michael Flynn, who resigned as National Security Adviser after similar reports surfaced about his conversations with Kislyak, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and two other members of the campaign are said to have met with the ambassador.
Sessions' explanation, Pelosi said Friday, did not stand up to scrutiny.
"Everything's about timing," Pelosi said Friday at an event held by Politico at the Newseum in Washington. "When this meeting was happening, it was very clear since the summer that the Russians were hacking our election system, so it wasn't like they were saying never mind about that, let's talk about the Ukraine."
"For him to say 'I was just meeting with him in the normal course of the senator meeting the Russian ambassador… was beyond naive," she added. "It was almost pathetic."
During his press conference Thursday, Sessions said he did not "recall any specific political discussions" with Kislyak, but said a conversation about Ukraine "got a little bit… testy."
The Democratic leader was among the first lawmakers to call for Sessions to resign from his post at the Justice Department, a demand she reiterated Thursday after Sessions announced his decision to recuse himself. On Friday, she explained that it was a matter of the intergrity of the law.
"The very idea that the top cop would go to his colleagues in the Senate and withhold the truth, this is not an unsophisticated person, he's a prosecutor and he knows what's there," Pelosi said Friday.
On Thursday, President Trump released a statement on Facebook defending Sessions.
"Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional," Trump wrote. "This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win."
