Attorney general should testify before Senate Judiciary Committee again, Franken says

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Attorney general should testify before Senate Judiciary Committee again, Franken says

By Tory Newmyer July 23 at 12:51 PM

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about a Washington Post report that he may have discussed campaign-related matters with Russia’s ambassador to Washington last year.

Franken, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, said he believes Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) also wants Sessions to testify on the matter.

The Post reported Friday that Ambassador Sergey Kislyak told his higher-ups in Moscow that he discussed the campaign and Russian policy priorities with Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, despite public assertions to the contrary by the embattled attorney general. Kislyak’s accounts of the conversations were intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

(The Russian Embassy in Washington announced on Twitter that Kislyak’s tenure ended Saturday, the Associated Press reported.)

“What I do know is what I read, which is that I guess someone in Kislyak’s position can sometimes distort what he says when he is reporting back to build himself up,” Franken told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I also saw in those reports that Kislyak isn’t that type. And it seems to me that since Attorney General Sessions hasn’t been terribly truthful regarding these things that it’s more likely that what Kislyak was saying was the case.”

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/07/23/attorney-general-should-testify-before-senate-judiciary-committee-again-franken-says/