The Cloud Over Jeff Sessions' Head Just Got Darker

By Chris Smith, Vanity Fair

10 June 17

The attorney general helped fire Jim Comey. The former F.B.I. director may be returning the favor.

nside the jam-packed Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, Jim Comey’s blunt words set off audible squalls of shock: “The president chose to defame me.” Wow, murmured the press. “Those were lies, plain and simple.” Uhnnn, gasped the tiny group of civilians seated in the back of the room.

Comey’s words, and those of the 17 senators questioning him, gushed out for three and a half hours Thursday morning. There were discussions of an awkward White House dinner, Russian cyber-mischief, and Thomas Becket. Yet the most significant moments were about words that couldn’t be said publicly, and things that weren’t done—and both turned the heat of the investigation directly onto Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sessions has been tangled up in this mess since nearly its beginning. While serving as a prominent Trump campaign surrogate, Sessions met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak—meetings he failed to disclose on a security clearance form when Trump nominated Sessions to become A.G., later explaining it as a benign oversight. Still, that failure eventually forced Sessions to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. (Just how recused Sessions really is came into question in May, however, when he wrote a letter recommending Comey’s firing.)

Even so, Sessions had cannily managed to stay on the periphery of the scandal—until yesterday. Comey was quizzed by California Senator Kamala Harris, who is becoming the breakout Democratic star of the intelligence committee’s hearings. Harris wanted to know more about the conversation in which Comey pleaded with Sessions to keep Trump from interfering with the F.B.I. ”You write [in Comey’s prepared statement] that he did not reply,” Harris said, in the deceptively casual tone that made her a highly-successful prosecutor in San Francisco. “What did he do, if anything? Did he just look at you? Was there a pause for a moment?”

“His body language gave me the sense, like, ‘What am I going to do?’” Comey said, adding a slight shrug in imitation of Sesssion’s non-reaction reaction. “He didn’t say anything.”

That was bad enough—that Sessions left Comey twisting in the bureaucratic wind, a unprotected target of Trump’s continuing wheedling. But Comey, responding to a question from Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, also teased a potentially damning new revelation: “We were aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting that would make [Session’s] continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic.” Several hours later, NBC broke the news that Comey told the intelligence committee members, in a private session, that Sessions may have had a third undisclosed meeting with Kislyak.

Reporters had been chasing leads about a possible third Sessions-Kislyak meeting for weeks; Comey’s description of it seems not to have been definitive. Nevertheless, he has finally made Sessions a central figure in the drama.

As he should have been all along. It’s difficult, for instance, to picture Rod Rosenstein, who had been on the job as deputy attorney general two weeks, concocting a memo justifying Comey’s firing without Sessions’ guidance. And while Trump can (almost) plausibly plead ignorance when it comes to the time-honored separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, Sessions certainly can’t: he was a federal prosecutor for 12 years, Alabama’s attorney general for two, and the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (And the truth is stupidity has only partly driven Trump actions—it’s also that he thinks the F.B.I. should be his personal "lock her up" police force.) Yet Sessions allowed Trump to shoo him out of the Oval Office so the president could press Comey one-on-one to drop the investigation of fired national security advisor Mike Flynn. “Sessions is the godfather of the Trump ideology,” a Senate insider says. “I think he and Trump are covering up for a reason, and it’s a reason worse than the coverup itself.”

Precisely. Maybe there is no single smoking Kalashnikov. Yet throughout this strange affair the president and the attorney general have behaved as if they have something serious to hide. “The Comey testimony confirmed a lot of things that had been reported in the media, and that investigators knew,” a Senate intelligence committee source says. “But it also raised a lot more questions.”

Many of which will now be aimed at Sessions. The House and Senate intelligence committees will soon invite Sessions to testify. Robert Mueller, the special counsel now overseeing the D.O.J.’s investigation, will probably interrogate the attorney general first, though.

“Mueller will want to know, Why didn’t Sessions do more when Comey warned him about Trump’s inappropriate behavior?” says Matthew Miller, who was D.O.J. spokesman for attorney general Eric Holder. “Why did Sessions sign off on Comey’s firing despite knowing about the warning that Trump was trying to meddle with Comey? And Mueller can’t ignore looking at whether Sessions intentionally concealed his meetings with Kislyak.”

As Comey walked out of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing room, he did not look relieved—he looked exhausted, pale, almost waxen. But he had succeeded in shifting one burden: When Comey was F.B.I. director, Trump had insisted he make the Russia “cloud” go away. Instead, the darkness is now hovering ominously over the head of Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions.