The White House was reportedly relieved with the testimony of James Comey, who failed to deliver any single breakthrough moment during his three-hour hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Still, the former F.B.I. director set in motion a number of questions about Donald Trump and his associates that the administration may struggle to answer. The bulk of Comey’s testimony focused on his memos documenting Trump’s efforts to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Mike Flynn, which could serve as the cornerstone for charges that the president obstructed justice. But Comey also tossed off some intriguingly ambiguous comments about one Trump associate in particular: Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
While speaking before the Senate panel, Comey defended his decision not to inform Sessions about his controversial one-on-one conversation with Trump, in which the president allegedly asked the F.B.I. director if he could see his way to “letting Flynn go,” by suggesting that the attorney general was somehow compromised.
“Our judgment, as I recall, was that he was very close to and inevitably going to recuse himself for a variety of reasons,” Comey told the Senate panel. Comey’s judgment was validated shortly afterward: in early March, Sessions did indeed recuse himself from the entire Russian investigation, after it was revealed that the former senator and top Trump surrogate failed to disclose a series of meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the election.
Comey dropped other breadcrumbs, too: “We also were aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting, that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic, and so we were—we were convinced, and, in fact, I think we had already heard that the career people [at the Justice Department] were recommending that he recuse himself, that he was not going to be in contact with Russia-related matters much longer.”
After Comey’s testimony, Sessions forcefully rejected the implication that his recusal was inevitable due to some sort of impropriety on his part. “Given Attorney General Sessions’s participation in President Trump’s campaign, it was for that reason, and that reason alone, the attorney general made the decision on March 2, 2017 to recuse himself from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States,” a Justice Department spokesman said in a statement.
The department also rebutted Comey’s claim that Sessions did not respond when the F.B.I. director implored him not to leave him alone with the president. In his prepared remarks, Comey said Sessions “did not reply” and on Thursday added that he had “a recollection of [Sessions] just kind of looking at me . . . His body language gave me a sense like: what am I going to do?” Sessions disputes that. “Mr. Comey said, following a morning threat briefing, that he wanted to ensure he and his F.B.I. staff were following proper communications protocol with the White House,” his spokesperson said. “The attorney general was not silent; he responded to this comment by saying that the F.B.I. and Department of Justice needed to be careful about following appropriate policies regarding contacts with the White House.”
Comey, however, appears to have his reasons for raising questions about Sessions—and appears to be encouraging investigators and journalists to look closer. In a closed-door hearing that followed his public testimony Thursday, Comey reportedly told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the F.B.I. was aware of a potential third meeting between Sessions and Kislyak last year during a campaign event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Justice Department denied that the alleged meeting ever took place. Three sources familiar with the event told CNN that the information was based in part on Russian intercepts, although they noted that the Russian ambassador may have been exaggerating the extent of his contact.
