Franken: Sessions should come back before the Judiciary Committee

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Sunday said Attorney General Jeff Sessions should return before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

“I would like to give him some benefit of the doubt. He needs to come back before the committee and explain this,” Franken told ABC’s “This Week,” speaking of a recent report that Sessions met with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential campaign.

Franken questioned Sessions during his confirmation hearing about Russia’s contact with Trump campaign officials. Sessions at the time said he did not have any contact with Russian officials, though a Washington Post report last week revealed he spoke with Kislyak twice.

{mosads}A spokeswoman for the former Alabama Republican lawmaker clarified to the newspaper that Sessions met with Kislyak as a senator, not as an adviser to the Trump campaign.

Following the report, Democratic lawmakers called on Sessions to resign from his post heading the Justice Department.

But Franken, a member of the Judiciary Committee, stopped short of calling for Sessions’s prosecution.

“I don’t want to go there and definitively say we should be prosecuting the attorney general,” Franken said.

Sessions last week formally recused himself from any investigation dealing with the Trump campaign.