Sen. Elizabeth Warren is joining Reps. Nany Pelosi and Elijah Cummings in calling for U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions to step down after a Washington Post report revealed that he spoke with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. twice over the last year.
Warren fired off six tweets about the report and called for a special prosecutor to investigate.
"It's a simple q: 'Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election?'"
"Jeff Sessions answered 'No.' Turns out he met with the Russian Ambassador. Two months before the election."
"This is not normal. This is not fake news. This is a very real & serious threat to the national security of the United States."
"We need a special prosecutor totally independent of the AG. We need a real, bipartisan, transparent Congressional investigation into Russia.”
And we need Attorney General Jeff Sessions – who should have never been confirmed in the first place – to resign. We need it now."
Sessions spoke privately with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in September in his Senate office when he was then a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and one of President Trump’s foreign policy advisors. He also had contact with the ambassador at a Heritage Foundation event when Kislyak, along with other ambassadors, approached him when he was leaving the podium.
The question Warren was referring to was posed to Sessions in January from Sen. Patrick Leahy, asking if he has “been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?”
Sessions answered “no.”
Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman, said there was “absolutely nothing misleading about his answer.”
“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Flores said.
Sessions responded to the report late Wednesday.
“I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false,” he said in a statement.