The White House dismissed as a partisan attack questions about whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied during his confirmation hearing about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. while he was a prominent surrogate for Donald Trump’s campaign.

The Justice Department confirmed late Wednesday that Sessions had contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak but said those were as part of his work as a senator rather than as a key backer of Trump’s presidential bid. Sessions testified during his Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 10 that he had no contacts with Russian officials.

The revelation prompted top Democrats in Congress to call for his ouster.

"After lying under oath to Congress about his own communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

White House official Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the reports "the latest attack against the Trump administration by partisan Democrats."

She added, "General Sessions met with the ambassador in an official capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is entirely consistent with his testimony" to the Senate Judiciary Committee at a confirmation hearing in January.

Sessions on Thursday said "the remarks are unbelievable to me."

"Well, I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign," Sessions told NBC. "Those remarks are unbelievable to me and I don't have anything else to say about that.



"I've said that whenever it's appropriate, I will recuse myself, there's no doubt about that."

A Sessions spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, rejected accusations that he had misled lawmakers.

"Last year, the senator had over 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian, German and Russian ambassadors,” she said. “He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign -- not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee."

The revelation, reported earlier by The Washington Post, has raised fresh questions about which Trump associates had contacts with Russian government officials during the presidential campaign and what was discussed. It also intensified calls for Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian hacking in last year’s campaign.

"If reports are accurate that Attorney General Sessions -- a prominent surrogate for Donald Trump -- met with Ambassador Kislyak during the campaign, and failed to disclose this fact during his confirmation, it is essential that he recuse himself from any role in the investigation of Trump campaign ties to the Russians,” Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “This is not even a close call; it is a must.”

As an Alabama Republican senator, Sessions was visited by Kislyak in his Capitol Hill office on Sept. 8, the Justice Department said in its statement. He also met with the envoy as part of a small group of ambassadors after an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation in July at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

The Justice Department rejected suggestions that Sessions was misleading in his testimony, saying that as a senator he discussed relations between the U.S. and Russia during the September meeting with Kislyak. Ambassadors would often make superficial comments about election-related news, but those were not the substance of discussions, the department said.

Sessions was asked by Democratic Senator Al Franken during a Jan. 10 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee what he would do if he learned that anyone tied to the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian government during the course of the campaign.

“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he said, adding that he had “been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

The White House official on Thursday accused Franken of pushing the story to distract from Trump’s well-received address to a joint session of Congress earlier this week.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said during a CNN town hall Wednesday night that Sessions should recuse himself from any inquiries.

“I don’t know that there’s anything between the Trump campaign and the Russians. I’m not going to base my decision based on newspaper articles,” Graham said. “If there is something there, and it goes up the chain of investigation, it is clear to me that Jeff Sessions, who is my dear friend, cannot make this decision about Trump.”

Graham also said that if the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered any sign of potential criminal activities, a special prosecutor should be appointed to handle the matter.

Sessions is the second Trump administration official to face tough questions about his contact with Kislyak. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was fired by Trump after it was revealed he had not accurately portrayed the content of his conversations with the Russian envoy to other administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence.

“It appears Attorney General Sessions may have perjured himself by falsely denying under oath that he had contact with the Russian government during the campaign,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Zac Petkanas said in a statement. “As these meetings must obviously be included as part of the FBI investigation, the Attorney General must recuse himself immediately and appoint a special prosecutor as he cannot be expected to investigate himself.”

Obama Appointees

The revelation that Sessions and Kislyak met came shortly after a report in the New York Times that the British and Dutch governments provided information to the U.S. government describing meetings between associates of Trump and Russian officials in European cities.

The story also described a deliberate campaign by Obama administration political appointees to spread information about Russia’s alleged attempts to interfere in the election, as well as revelations that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications discussing contacts with Trump associates.

Eric Schultz, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama, confirmed that Obama administration officials had sought to document intelligence related to possible Russian interference in the campaign.

“This situation was serious, as is evident by President Obama’s call for a review -- and as is evident by the United States response,” Schultz said in an email. “When the intelligence community does that type of comprehensive review, it is standard practice that a significant amount of information would be compiled and documented.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about either the Sessions meetings or The New York Times article, but Trump administration officials have repeatedly insisted that there was no collusion between the president’s team and the Russian government.

They’ve dismissed questions about the matter as misgivings by Democrats upset over the election results, and have said that intelligence officials -- including at the FBI -- have concluded there was no consistent contact during the campaign between Trump allies and the Kremlin.

“I think that Russia’s involvement in activity has been investigated up and down,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday. “So the question becomes at some point, if there’s nothing to further investigate, what are you asking people to investigate?”

Schiff said in a television interview Wednesday night that his panel would investigate allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

“We have reached a written agreement, the minority and the majority in the House intelligence committee, that we will investigate allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign,” Schiff told MSNBC.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Devin Nunes of California, said Monday that he had not yet seen evidence of contact between Trump campaign staff and Russian intelligence agents presented by the U.S. intelligence community.