reasons that the russian ambassador was seeking to meet with him. read a line from your report. in the case of the september meeting, one department official who came do the defense of the attorney general said there s just not strong recollection of what was said. that sounds almost to me, correct me if i m wrong, like what flynn said about i just don t recall the conversations. if we talked about sanctions or not, i just don t recall. does that sound similar to you? there is a bit of an echo there. and this is the same individual, sergy kizic the russian ambassador who was fired just last month. again a senior official in the trump administration having contact with the russian ambassador and having a terrible
committee. is that a valid difference? reason for not disclosing it in his confirmation. he s trying to imply it s routine. our story tried to assess that by contacting every member of the armed services committee we could. senators routinely meet with ambassadors and heard back from 19 of them, and sessions the only one to meet with the russian ambassador. talking about a meeting that happened in middle of unprecedented attack by the russian government, alleged attack on the 2016 presidential race. decision to meet with the ambassador in that moment and failed to remember that several months later is really problematic. go through it a little bit more. officials tell you that sessions did not consider those conversations relevant to the lawmakers questions. what else did they say about it?
tonight, said should recuse himself if he didn t reveal two conversations with the russian ambassador last year in confirmation hearings. i suspect by the end of the show get a ton more of those and by tomorrow morning see a lot more of that. because what that presents for the attorney general is a problem he probably didn t anticipate as a problem. this is ongoing serious investigation by the fbi and now will be questions as to whether or not he can reasonably oversee that as attorney general. and i think you re going to see more and more including republicans have trouble explaining why that shouldn t take place. stand by evan. bring in now the panel. margaret hoover, mark preston, dana bash, thank you for joining
raising concerns. here s evan why was the top russian spy at the convention to begin with? i was at convention and ran into a lot of ambassador. both democrats and republicans invite as courtesy, ambassadors from all these countries. obviously you know, you ve got friendly countries like britain and czech republic and france who show up, sort of celebration of american democracy. they do invite them. not considered to be unusual but russians there for a different reason. to gather information, spy on the american electoral process and as greg aptly pointed out, in middle of all of this, carrying out a very audacious operation to disrupt and
what he s saying and extent to which it is at odds with our understanding of his meeting, his spokesperson is arguing that he was meeting with this russian ambassador in capacity as senator and therefore his answer in the confirmation hearing was not being misleading. i think that s a difficult point of view to sell. but he was asked generally if he had any contact with russians during the entire event. but let s put this up. spokesperson saying. absolutely nothing misleading about his answer. had over 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as senior member of the armed service committee, asked about trump campaign meetings not as senator and member of the armed services