Prompted by something or someone, a New York Times reporter called the Department of Justice and asked the spokesperson if the Attorney General had recently testified in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. It turns out that, yes, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was giving testimony just last week.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week by the special counsel’s office as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election and whether the president obstructed justice since taking office, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.
The meeting marked the first time that investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are known to have interviewed a member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.
That’s not the only news coming out of the Department of Justice, though. Jonathan Swan of Axios broke the story last night that the Director of the FBI Christopher Wray has threatened to resign over pressure, from Jeff Sessions, that he fire his deputy Andrew McCabe and clean his house of anyone too closely connected to James Comey. The Washington Post confirmed the story but not specifically that Wray had gone so far as to threaten to resign over it.
What we’re seeing here in these two news items is the investigators pushing back on another attempt to impede their investigation. They’re being bullied along with the FBI more generally by a concerted effort to discredit them. You can choose how much you want to trust the Hamilton 68 dashboard, considering people like Michael Chertoff and William Kristol sit on their board, but among the suspected Russian troll accounts they’re monitoring the FBI has the most twitter mentions (1161, as of this writing) in the last forty-eight hours. There’s now a naked confluence of effort coming from congressional Republicans, the White House and Russian social media troll and bot accounts.
The FBI isn’t defenseless, however, which is why we now know that Sessions has been splitting his time between being interviewed about his connections to Russia and his efforts to destroy the investigation into his connections to Russia.
