(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Newly declassified documents show that the FBI’s 2017 investigation of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have been influenced by the political demands of two Democratic senators.
The files reveal that the FBI opened an investigation into Sessions for potential false statements to Congress just one day after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey and weeks after Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Al Franken, D-Minn., demanded that the FBI investigate him.
The files, reported first Monday by Just the News, were part of a trove of documents declassified by President Donald Trump for the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
Leahy and Franken wrote to Comey on March 20, 2017, urging him to investigate Sessions, who at the time was Comey’s boss, after Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had no contacts with the Russian government about the 2016 presidential election.
Sessions had also testified that he “did not have communications with the Russians” while serving as a Trump campaign surrogate.
Sessions later submitted supplemental information clarifying that he had met with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on at least two occasions. Notably, one of those meetings, however, was an indirect interaction at a larger diplomatic gathering
ABC News previously reported on the Democrats’ letter and the FBI’s investigation of Sessions. But the newly declassified documents reveal a previously unreported detail: the Democratic senators’ letter and a copy of an article from leftist news site HuffPost were among the materials contained in the FBI’s investigative file.
Sessions did not face any charges after then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller interviewed him as part of the investigation.
Leahy and Franken, however, had demanded a far more aggressive response. They claimed in their letter that they were “concerned” by Sessions’ “lack of candor to the Committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury.”
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. Days later, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The declassification comes less than a week after the White House released separate records showing that the FBI targeted Trump directly in the aftermath of Comey’s firing.
