Trump officials invent a new strategy to dodge questions it wont stop unless Congress gets tough
by Yvette Cabrera at Think Progress
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-officials-invent-a-new-strategy-to-dodge-questions-it-wont-stop-unless-congress-gets-tough-72d47ae079f7
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And although Democratic and independent senators grilled Sessions about his legal grounds for refusing to discuss his conversations with Trump, Sessions repeatedly left the committee hanging. During an exchange with Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) about whether the president had ever expressed his frustration regarding Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from matters related to the FBI’s Russia probe, the attorney general responded: “I’m not able to invoke executive privilege. That’s the president’s prerogative.”
Instead, Sessions cited a “long-standing” Department of Justice policy as his reason for not sharing “private communications” with the president, while seemingly leaving the door open for Trump to invoke the privilege in the future.
“It’s my judgement that it would be inappropriate for me to answer and reveal private conversations with the president when he has not had a full opportunity to review the questions and to make a decision on whether or not to approve such an answer,” Sessions told Heinrich, who accused him of impeding the investigation.
In an interview Tuesday with PBS NewsHour, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) didn’t buy Sessions’ excuse. He pointed out that the questions that the Senate Intelligence Committee asked of Sessions could have been easily anticipated, and said there was “no reason why” the White House could not have instructed the attorney general about whether Trump was going to invoke executive privilege.
“[The White House] didn’t want him to [invoke executive privilege]. They didn’t want the optics of it, and that’s not a good reason for refusing to answer the questions,” Schiff told PBS NewsHour. “But more than that, if the attorney general allowed himself to be used as a pretext, to give justification for a firing that was made on other grounds, that not only violates his recusal, it also potentially violates the law or is a highly unethical practice and we need to find out whether that’s the case.”
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