Donald Trump must have thought he was home free. He had his people in control of the Justice Department, Republicans in House and Senate were content to make a token “investigation” of Trump’s Russia connections for appearances sake, and the media could be instantly distracted with the tiniest crumb. Look! A speech!
What Trump didn’t expect was a voice from the past.
In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.
The last days of the Obama administration resemble the final moments of Pompeii. Throughout the executive branch, officials hurried to gather up information and store it away against the towering threat of deliberate ignorance glowering on the horizon. Scientists frantically copied climate data while other officials worked to save democracy itself. The information they smuggled out before the ash rained down shows that the connections between the Trump team and Russia were even more numerous than expected.
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
In addition to the statements of allies, American intelligence assets caught conversations of Russian officials bragging about their connections with Trump.
That information is closing in around Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
As attorney general, Sessions is ideally placed to suppress investigations and discard evidence. And he might have gotten away with it—if it wasn’t for dedicated officials who worked into the last moments to throw democracy a safety line.
The disclosures about the contacts came as new questions were raised about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s ties to the Russians. According to a former senior American official, he met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, twice in the past year. The details of the meetings were not clear, but the contact appeared to contradict testimony Mr. Sessions provided Congress during his confirmation hearing in January when he said he “did not have communications with the Russians.”
Now Sessions is down to making weasel-worded statements such as …
Mr. Sessions said in a statement late Wednesday that he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign.”
Which seems to leave open the possibility that Sessions spoke with the Russians about strategy for the campaign, about deals for the campaign, about actions after the campaign, about … pretty much anything, really, since the definition of “issues of the campaign” could be so narrow as to be meaningless. And that’s assuming the Sessions is telling the truth even on that point, which would be an abrupt change from his Senate testimony.