It’s no great credit to Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he finally recused himself
from all Justice Department investigations relating to the 2016
presidential campaign — and specifically from all current or future
inquiries into Russian attempts to influence the election. Short of
tendering his resignation, he had no other real choice.
Mr.
Sessions, who was President Trump’s first and most ardent supporter in
the Senate, as well as a top national security adviser to the Trump
campaign, was never in a position to serve as an impartial arbiter of
any investigation involving Mr. Trump or his campaign. But until
Thursday he refused to cede control over Justice Department
investigations into contacts between the campaign and the Russian
government.
That stance became untenable on Wednesday night, after The Washington Post reported
that, while testifying at his confirmation hearings in January, Mr.
Sessions had failed to disclose two meetings he had with the Russian
ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the campaign. In response to a
question about connections between Russia and the Trump team, from
Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, Mr. Sessions said under oath
that he was “not aware of any of those activities.” Then, without
prompting, he volunteered, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or
two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the
Russians.”
As
it turns out, Mr. Sessions met twice with Mr. Kislyak, once at the
Republican National Convention in July, and again in his Senate office
in September — around the time that Russian efforts to meddle in the
election on behalf of Mr. Trump reached their peak. Still, meeting an
ambassador is no crime in itself, which makes Mr. Sessions’s denial even
more inexplicable. On Thursday, he said he “never had meetings with
Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries” about the campaign. Yet a
Trump administration official told CNBC’s John Harwood that Mr. Sessions had talked about the election with the ambassador, if only in “superficial” terms.
Mr.
Sessions is the latest administration official to be caught between his
words and the truth on Russia. Just a few weeks ago, the president fired Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
Mr. Sessions’s recusal is only a first necessary step. The second must be the appointment of a special counsel
— an independent, nonpartisan actor who can both investigate and
prosecute any criminal acts in relation to Russian interference, whether
by Mr. Sessions or anyone else. That’s the only way an investigation
can have credibility with the public. Simply shifting investigative
authority to one of Mr. Sessions’s deputies, who report to him on all
other matters, would do nothing to cure the underlying conflict.
Republican
leaders in Congress also need to establish a bipartisan select
committee to investigate whether the Trump campaign had a role in
Russia’s election interference. Intelligence committees in both houses
of Congress have said they will begin their own investigations, but
those are run by the likes of Devin Nunes, chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee. Mr. Nunes has dismissed concerns about the
issue, and was one of several top Republicans dispatched by the White House to talk with reporters to challenge news reports tying Russia to the Trump campaign.
One
person who said recusal wasn’t necessary was President Trump. Only
hours before Mr. Sessions’s announcement, Mr. Trump expressed “total”
confidence in his attorney general, even though he said he had not known
about his communications with the ambassador. In other words, Mr. Trump
appears to be saying that he has no problem with being kept in the
dark.
It’s
hard to decide what is more disturbing: that so many top officials in
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and administration were in contact
with the Russian government during and after the campaign, or that they
keep neglecting to tell the truth.
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