certain questions particularly per tin ta inning to discussions with the president, does that look bad for sessions if he is called before bob mueller. it does. fundamentally what s at stake here, the attorney general said the president wanted my views on whether to fire comey and the president said he wanted my views. then when he was asked what did the president say about the russia investigation? what d he say about the rationale for firing comey the attorney general refused to answer. that goes to the heart of the question of whether the president may have obstructed justice here. he do think it is an issue that bob mutualer and the special counsel s office will be very interested in. julia, your article came out at 5:00 a.m. here is in what you wrote. it can be hard to get a stlat aeb out of attorney general jeff sessions. answer the question for you that your headline poses. why did he meet with the russian ambassador? i don t recall. i m kidding. i m so glad you stopped th
well, if you had done nothing wrong the obvious conclusion is you would be happy to talk about thing. it seems the only time that they don t want to discuss their discussion their conversations with president trump is when it s about russia. and that has no factual basis, no legal basis. and sessions is in dereliction of his duty. let s bring in robert, julia and jeremy. jeremy, you are the lawyer here. a very basic question. can you say, i can t recall, that many times and get away with it? you can you will have a hard time if you are talking to the fbi and you keep invoking faulty memory if they think you do have a good memory, particularly if there are other documents which show that at the time you were involved in discussions. that s why i think investigators such as mueller and congressional documents are going to have to look at documents and e-mails and calendars to try to compare this testimony with the documentary
citing instead? that s right. so in this particular case, and this pertains to in particular conversations a conversation that sessions apparently had with the president about the firing of the fbi director. so it really is a very important specific question. the attorney general was a little bit unclear. on one hand he said that he was not able to assert the privilege. he said that the president had not actually asserted the privilege. and so then he seemed to be referring to other department of justice privileges which sometimes can include the attorney sln client privilege. but that usually is with respect to when the justice department is giving legal advice to the president. so he didn t assert the executive privilege. he didn t exactly say that he was asserting the legal attorney/client privilege. and so he left himself open to whether or not he actually
with campaign leaders on both sides of the aisle. it s about the nature of these relationships, the regularity of these meetings and conversations, and what the broader picture reveals about what russia or the trump campaign was perhaps trying to get out of this dynamic. robert, let me play first of all, hold on one second. let me play an exchange featuring the independent senator from maine, who caucuses with the democrats, angus king. a very accomplished lawyer and his questioning with sessions today. in any of your discussions about the firing of james comey, did the question of the russia investigation ever come up? i cannot answer that because it was a communication by the president, or if any such occurred, it would be a communication that he has not waived. so, robert, that was again that kind of frustrating lack of an answer that our friend jeremy tells us may not hold up. that may not be a good enough
has the president invoked executive privilege in the case of your testimony here today? he has not. then what is the basis of your refusal to answer these questions? senator king, the president has a constitutional i understand that, but the president hasn t asserted it. well you said you don t have the power to assert the power of executive privilege, so what is the legal basis for your refusal to answer these questions? i am protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses. that is the best answer we got to the question that hung over attorney general jeff sessions testimony today. if the president didn t invoke executive privilege, then why won t sessions talk about their conversations, and what was this rule he was citing today? joining us now to talk about the law in all this, jill wine-banks, one of the special prosecutors during the watergate scandal, former general counsel to the united states army, and carrie cordero, former national securi