Robert Mueller may have found his opening for arresting Jeff Sessions
Even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller leaves Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort to think about his options while under house arrest, Mueller is swiftly moving forward in prosecuting other Trump-Russia angles. Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos has confessed to colluding with the Russian government on behalf of the campaign. He’s also admitted that he got the approval of two Trump campaign officials. Neither of them is Jeff Sessions – but Mueller’s door against Sessions has nonetheless been kicked wide open.
Papadopoulos says he got approval for his Russian collusion meeting from campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his direct supervisor in the campaign, Sam Clovis. It’s now confirmed by NBC News that Clovis testified before a grand jury last week, and our belief is that he had to have either been testifying in his own defense, or against Manafort, or against his own campaign supervisor Jeff Sessions. The question has been what specific crime Sessions could be indicted and arrested for. Now it’s surfaced.
Actually, it’s been in plain sight all along. During his confirmation hearings for Attorney General at the start of the year, Sessions testified before the Senate and volunteered an oddly specific lie that wasn’t even in response to the question he’d been asked. The Republican-controlled Senate was never going to pursue criminal action against its former colleague Sessions. But based on the Papadopoulos confession, Robert Mueller can now do precisely that.
Papadopoulos claims Jeff Sessions was in the room when he sought approval for his Russian collusion meeting. Even if Sessions claims he didn’t hear it or didn’t understand it, Clovis may have testified otherwise last week. Proving that Sessions lied about his own Russian meetings would require proving that those meetings were nefarious in intent. But Sessions said “I have no knowledge of any such conversations by anyone connected to the Trump campaign.” He knew about the Papadopoulos meeting, which Papadopoulos admits was an attempt at collusion with Russia. This means Mueller can arrest Sessions for perjury and pressure him to flip on Trump.
