During his confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Jeff Sessions denied having knowledge of “any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government during the course of the campaign.”
In a now-infamous exchange, Sessions, answering a question from Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) about what he’d do if evidence emerged that the Trump campaign had been in touch with Russian officials, said, “I’m not aware of those activities.”
Less than two months after Sessions’ testimony, the Washington Post broke news that Sessions had in fact met with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least twice during the campaign. The revelation about Sessions misled senators led to him recusing himself from overseeing the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia, and the appointment of Bob Mueller as special counsel.
But this week, we learned that Sessions’ knowledge of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia went beyond his meetings with Kislyak. According to numerous reports and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI, Sessions and Trump participated in a March 2016 conversation about whether Trump should meet with Putin — a meeting in which Papadopoulos made clear he could arrange a Trump-Putin rendezvous because of his “connections.”
Both CNN and the New York Times report that Sessions played a key role in nixing the proposed meeting. On Wednesday, CNN reported that Sessions “shut down the idea” after Papadopoulos pitched it during the March 2016 meeting — a get-together Trump proudly highlighted on Twitter.
#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016https://t.co/aANxirUJJD pic.twitter.com/VlMynYN3sd
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2016
Citing “a person in the room,” CNN reports that the Putin-Trump meeting idea was “raised by George Papadopoulos as he introduced himself.” Papadopoulos, who Trump name-dropped as one of his foreign policy advisers just days earlier, told the group “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin,” according to details of his guilty plea made public this week. The timeline laid out in the plea agreement indicates Papadopoulos had just returned from Europe, where he had met with a Kremlin-connected professor who took an interest in him because of his role with the Trump campaign.
CNN’s latest reporting tracks the account of the March 2016 meeting contained in a New York Times report published on Tuesday.
The Times, citing an interview with a Trump campaign aide who were in the room for that March 2016 meeting, reports that Trump listened as Papadopoulos proposed the meeting with Putin and even asked questions. But then Sessions, “as the campaign’s top national security official, spoke vehemently against the idea, asking others not to discuss it again. Mr. Trump did not challenge him, the former aide said.”
Regardless of whether or not reports about Sessions’ role during that meeting are accurate, Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, along with the CNN and Times reports, indicates he knew campaign surrogates were in communication with Russian officials. Recall, however, that Sessions denied having such knowledge during his testimony to Congress.
The inconsistency between Sessions’ testimony and what we now know about the Trump campaign’s contact with Russia is particularly problematic for the attorney general, given that he was under oath. But the sequence of events detailed in Papadopoulos’ guilty plea — events further detailed by CNN and the Times — also pose problems for Trump.
As ThinkProgress has detailed, during a news conference in February, Trump said he was unaware of any campaign aides who had contact with Russians during the election. His denial is impossible to square with what we now know about the March 2016 meeting of his national security team in which both he and Sessions were informed that a campaign adviser was in touch with Russian officials and could even arrange a meeting with Putin.