House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) downplayed revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the 2016 campaign, saying that he had still seen no evidence of an American colluding with Russia to interfere in the election.
Ryan side-stepped a question from one reporter Thursday on whether Sessions had misled the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation process, when he said he he hadn’t met with Russians during the 2016 campaign. The Washington Post reported that he did, but a spokesperson for Sessions has maintained Sessions was acting in his capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Ryan did say, however, that Sessions should recuse himself if he personally is the subject of an investigation.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter,” reported that U.S. investigators had examined contacts Sessions had with Russian officials while he was advising President Donald Trump’s campaign.
“If he himself is the subject of an investigation, of course he would” recuse himself Ryan said, responding to a reporter. “But if he’s not, I don’t see any purpose or reason to doing this.”
He added later: “We have seen no evidence from any of these ongoing investigations that anybody in the Trump campaign or the Trump team was involved in any of this. We have been presented with no evidence that an American was colluding with the Russians to meddle in the elections.”
One reporter asked Ryan about a New York Times report Wednesday that members of the Obama administration had frantically sought to preserve intelligence about Russian involvement in the election by saying Democrats had a political motivation to their concern about Russia, as well as a national security one.
“I think Democrats are lighting their hair on fire to get you to cover this story, to try and keep repeating the same story,” he said. “I think they’re trying to get this coverage going. There’s nothing new that we have seen here. This is stuff that we’ve been going over.”
“And by the way,” he continued, “we are going to make sure that we leave no stone unturned and that’s why our intelligence committees are conducting the investigations. And that’s where they should be conducted. Because you have to protect your sources and methods of intelligence gathering, which is why we have intelligence gathering in the first place.”
