GOP rep: Sessions should have been ‘more clear’ about meetings

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) said Thursday he thinks Attorney General Jeff Sessions should have been “more clear” about his meetings last year with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S..

“There’s a lot of congressmen and senators who meet with leaders of foreign governments and ambassadors, especially on committees like the one that Jeff Sessions served on,” Duffy told CNN’s “New Day.”

“But with that said, it gives me some pause that he wasn’t more clear about the meeting. I think as he’s going through the campaign with Mr. Trump though, he was acting in his official capacity as a senator, you want to disclose that information, and I think it should have been more clear during his confirmation process that he did have the meetings.”

Duffy said he was going to take Sessions at “face value.”

{mosads}”As these meetings took place … that they were in his official capacity. He was a U.S. senator; he has a lot of work on his plate,” Duffy said.

“I think frankly at that time, there wasn’t a lot of people in America who thought that Donald Trump was going to win. I highly doubt there was a correlation between those meetings and any campaign activity. I do think it was in the senator’s capacity as a senator.”

Sessions spoke twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Sessions did not disclose the contact with Kislyak during his confirmation hearings, testifying under oath that he “did not have communications with the Russians.”

The report raises new questions about contact between President Trump’s campaign officials and the Kremlin.

The contacts are coming under scrutiny because Sessions endorsed Trump early in his presidential bid, stumping and introducing him at campaign rallies, and officially joined the Trump campaign last February.

A spokeswoman for Sessions confirmed the contact with Kislyak, saying the attorney general spoke on the phone with the ambassador from his office in September.