(Bloomberg) -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday stuck by his refusal to tell Congress whether Donald Trump ever told him to take action to hinder investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Congress should now force Sessions to answer, Representative Adam Schiff of California said after the panel spent almost four hours questioning the attorney general behind closed doors.
“It was disturbing to me the attorney general would not answer the question,” Schiff said. “There is no privileged basis to decline to answer a question like that.” He said Sessions didn't claim he was told to exert executive privilege, but Schiff noted that Sessions and others have previously maintained he needs to protect Trump's possible use of that privilege in the future.
“We have the power to compel him to answer,” he said.
The chairman of the House Intelligence panel, Devin Nunes of California, said that if Democrats think Congress should force Sessions to answer that question, they should join Republicans in requiring Sessions and the Justice Department to turn over documents “on what prompted the FBI's Russia meddling investigation.”
Nunes and other panel Republicans have been slamming Sessions over what they see as his stonewalling of their August subpoenas for information on what prompted the FBI's Russia investigation in the first place.
Sessions's almost four hours of testimony appeared to do little to resolve the growing divisions on the once-bipartisan panel. Ten months into their probe of Russian meddling in the U.S. election, panel Republicans and Democrats now are planning to prepare competing reports on their findings, the officials said.
Private Conversations
A Justice Department spokesman, Sarah Isgur Flores, responded to Schiff's comments with a text that said Sessions was simply repeating what he's said previously in public about his private conversations with the president of the U.S.
“AG said same he said before -- he won't talk about communications w Potus,” Flores wrote in a text message. “But he also said same as he's said before that he's never been directed to do anything illegal or improper.”
As for Nunes's accusations that Sessions is stonewalling on document production, she said the Justice Department has provided members of the committee and House leadership “with any number of documents and multiple briefings related to this matter.”
Separately on Thursday, former Trump adviser Erik Prince, who founded the military services contractor Blackwater, was interviewed by the House Intelligence panel, with a transcript to be released later.
When Prince emerged, he said Schiff “should apologize for wasting all of our time” and that it was a “fishing expedition."
Democratic criticism of Sessions deepened after Special Counsel Robert Mueller -- who is investigating the Russian interference and whether anyone close to Trump colluded in it -- filed court documents in October about a meeting Sessions attended in March 2016. At the meeting, George Papadopoulos, an unpaid adviser, boasted of his Russian connections and said he could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Democrats weren't satisfied by Sessions's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 14, when he said he now remembers the meeting but didn't have a clear recollection of the details.
Campaign Contacts
Sessions also said he didn't recall having further discussions about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts after that, even though Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy adviser, has described such a conversation. Even so, Sessions denied that he lied in his testimony.
“I will not accept and reject accusations that I have ever lied,” Sessions said during the November hearing. “I have always told the truth, and I have answered every question as I understood them and to the best of my recollection.”
Sessions has also been tangling with House Intelligence Republicans since August over committee subpoenas seeking information from him and the Justice Department about a dossier on Trump that included salacious allegations. That opposition-research document was paid for by then-candidate Trump's political opponents, including Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Panel Republicans led by Nunes say the information they want might help to illustrate problems with how the FBI's probe of Russian election interference got started in 2016. Nunes has suggested that the FBI may have relied on the unverified political document to launch its investigation.
The subpoenas issued in August directed the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hand over documents “memorializing FBI's relationship” with the dossier's main writer -- former British spy Christopher Steele -- including payments made to Steele and whether there was any effort to corroborate information provided to the FBI by him.
The Republican subpoenas also sought information about whether the agency used any of the dossier information to obtain surveillance warrants in the Russia investigation. The Senate Judiciary Committee is also pursuing information about the dossier.
Nunes has complained that Sessions has been stonewalling in producing the documents. Both Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray have been warned that they run a risk of contempt of Congress action if the material isn't produced, according to the officials.
Schiff and other Democrats have called this line of inquiry a tangent and distraction from the committee's work.
To contact the reporters on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net, Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum, Larry Liebert
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