Something extraordinary has happened. In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions denied under oath that he had had any contact with Russian officials during the presidential campaign. But the Washington Post found out that he had met Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice in private meetings, in July and September, respectively. Per a press conference held Thursday afternoon, Sessions has recused himself from any investigation into Russia's conduct during the election.

To see ambassadors is a natural part of the job of a senator. Kislyak is a respected person and Russia is no pariah. The scandal is not that they met, but that Sessions lied. The most plausible explanation is that Sessions knows that there are many and murky links between the Trump administration and the Kremlin and he wants to hide them. They might involve business, hacking and perhaps more.

Numerous articles have detailed the Trump Organization's business links with Russia for three decades. President Donald Trump has emphasized that he has no investments in Russia. That might be true, but many wealthy people from the former Soviet Union have bought real estate invested in by him, mainly in the Trump Towers in Miami Beach and New York. Such purchases at high prices with money of dubious origin appear to form some share of his profits, though we cannot know exactly because he has not publicized his finances or tax returns.

Several specific cases have been publicized, though. The most spectacular is that Trump purchased a mansion in Palm Beach for $41 million in 2004 and then sold in 2008 at a recorded $95 million to the Russian multi-billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, cashing a net profit of $54 million in one single sale. Given the large number of very expensive apartments in the Trump Towers and their popularity among Russian businessmen, this might be Trump’s most profitable business, and these businessmen tend to buy their property in the U.S. through anonymous off-shore companies.

Cartoons on Vladimir Putin and Russia View All 85 Images

The other Russian affair of the Trump administration is the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. The 17 U.S. intelligence agencies have informed us that they were hacked by two Russian intelligence agencies, the military intelligence agency GRU and the largely domestic FSB. These emails were drip-fed to the U.S. media through the apparent Russian front organization Wikileaks. As a candidate, Trump called publicly on the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails and he praised Wikileaks for its leaks many times.

The question is whether Trump officials were invovled in the hacking, which is probably the most important matter for investigation. It is reported that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, his business associate Felix Sater and his previous informal foreign policy advisor Carter Page have ample contacts with Russian officials. Did they do anything impermissible with their official Russian contacts? An intelligence report by former British MI-6 agent Christopher Steele offers a lot of plausible information that needs to be verified in a proper investigation.

The current battlefront between the West and Russia runs through eastern Ukraine. Soon after the U.S. presidential election, the Russian-backed troops in Eastern Ukraine intensified their artillery fire, and all the more so after Trump’s inauguration. Two weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the separatists’ passports and the ruble has been made official currency in the occupied territories. Meanwhile at least four different groups of Ukrainian parliamentarians from the opposition have descended on Washington and tried to promote various pro-Russian “peace plans.” Cohen and Sater promoted one of them.