(CNN) Top Democrats plan to give Jeff Sessions a pass over new questions about his sworn testimony before Congress, fearing that publicly attacking the attorney general could give President Donald Trump a new reason to fire him and install a loyalist to oversee the Russia investigation.

Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee last year that "I pushed back" in 2016 when former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos proposed setting up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But Papadopoulos' attorney, in a court filing this month, said that Sessions "stated that the campaign should look into" a Putin-Trump meeting -- something that Papadopoulos himself reiterated in media interviews over the last few days.

But Democrats, so far, are reticent about raising a fuss over the discrepancy -- even though they strongly oppose Sessions' tenure atop the Justice Department. Democrats say they want Sessions to remain in the job because he is recused from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is overseeing. A new attorney general could take the reins and potentially curtail the Mueller probe -- or deny Mueller's report on the probe from ever being released to the public, they fear.

New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee who questioned Sessions about the meeting last year, told CNN that "right now, I don't think we want to do anything" about Sessions, worried that a new attorney general could put Mueller's report "in a safe" to deny making it public.

"We can't say that out loud too much, but we have to, we want him there -- for the time being at least," Nadler said.

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