Pelosi: Sessions’ recusal ‘is an admission that something was wrong’

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi panned Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from investigations related to last year’s presidential election as “insufficient” and “totally unacceptable” Friday morning, telling the audience at a POLITICO Playbook breakfast that it is “a reflection of the weak moral authority of this administration.”

Pelosi was one of the first Democrats to call for Sessions’ outright resignation Wednesday evening after The Washington Post reported that the attorney general had met multiple times with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the presidential campaign. Sessions’ meetings came at the height of Russian efforts to meddle in the election to the benefit of President Donald Trump, for whom Sessions was a high-profile surrogate.


Sessions did not disclose those meetings with Russia during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) during oral testimony that “I did not have communications with the Russians.” Upon the revelation that he had, in fact, met with a Russian official, Sessions said he had done so in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a part of Trump’s campaign.

The attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from any investigation related to last year’s election “is a very narrow recusal,” Pelosi said, suggesting that the arrangement might allow Sessions to continue to oversee other personal, political and financial ties between Trump and the Russian government.

“This is just totally unacceptable, and the very idea that they’re making excuses and splitting hairs and this or that – we have not seen the end of this,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. “The recusal is an admission that something was wrong. The very idea that the top cop would go to his colleagues in the Senate and withhold the truth. This is not an unsophisticated person. This is a prosecutor himself. He knows what’s there. And it’s just a reflection of the weak moral authority of this administration if they support what he is doing.”

The controversy surrounding Sessions is just the latest example of what Pelosi characterized as Trump’s puzzlingly soft stance toward Russia. Noting that Trump has shown a willingness to align himself with Russia on issues including Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions imposed because of it, Pelosi wondered aloud, “What do the Russians have on Donald Trump that he would do that?”