It can be hard to keep track of all the new developments in Trump's ever-escalating Russia scandal, but if you missed last Friday's addendum to the pile it was that this nation's intelligence services caught the Russian ambassador to the United States informing his superiors in Moscow that he and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions had "substantive" discussions about the Donald Trump campaign and that campaign's position towards Russia.
These intelligence intercepts are directly opposed to Sessions' own past assurances that he had done nothing of the sort, and Democratic Sen. Al Franken says the Senate Judiciary Committee would very much like Sessions to again appear before them to explain himself.
“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.” [...]
Franken said Sunday that he “absolutely” wants Sessions to appear before the Judiciary Committee again, adding, “I think Chairman Grassley does want him to come back.”
It has been speculated that the White House itself leaked this newest blockbuster implicating Sessions in an attempt to force his resignation, because Donald Trump is an ass and would most certainly do such a thing to be rid of an attorney general he now regards as insufficiently loyal to him, personally.
Regardless, Sessions' recounting of his meetings with the Russian ambassador is squarely at odds with what the man he met with reported back to his superiors, and the suggestion that the nation's new top legal official hid covert cooperation between himself and a foreign power is not something even Republican senators like Chuck Grassley can quite stomach sweeping under the rug.
Or, at least, that's what Sen. Franken suspects. We'll see—he may yet be giving his Republican colleagues too much credit.