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Sessions Is Questioned as Russia Inquiry Focuses on Obstruction

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week as part of the special counsel investigation, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday, making him the first member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to be interviewed in the inquiry.

Mueller has also told the president’s lawyers that he will most likely want to interview Trump, and one person familiar with the discussions has said that the special counsel appeared most interested in asking questions about the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, and about the former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Those topics show Mueller has an interest in whether the president tried to obstruct justice.

Mueller’s investigators have asked current and former Trump administration officials about what Trump cited as reasons for Comey’s firing, and why Trump was so concerned about having someone loyal to him oversee the Russia investigation, people familiar with the interviews said.

For Sessions, the interview was the latest in a balancing act that has lasted nearly a year. He has sought to get back in Trump’s good graces by pursuing investigations into issues like leaks to the news media and relaying Trump’s displeasure about senior FBI leadership to the bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray.

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But Sessions has also tried to present a veneer of independence in congressional testimony and now has met with investigators in Mueller’s inquiry, which has for months cast a shadow over the Trump White House.

News of the interview set off a day of revelations that highlighted Trump’s charged relationship with his top law enforcement officials.

Comey was said on Tuesday to have met last year with Mueller’s investigators to answer questions about memos he wrote detailing interactions with the president that had unnerved him. Trump also said he was not troubled that Sessions met with the special counsel and denied a report that Wray had threatened to resign.

“He didn’t at all,” Trump said of Wray, adding: “He did not even a little bit. Nope. He’s going to do a good job.”

The report, by the website Axios, said Sessions was pressuring Wray, at the president’s behest, to clear the FBI of loyalists to Comey. But Wray responded that he needed to move at his own pace to make changes, and that if Sessions and the president wanted replacements made more quickly, someone else would have to do it, a person familiar with the exchange said, adding that Wray stopped short of threatening to quit.

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Wray’s tenure has been tense as the president has repeatedly fanned suspicion about whether the FBI’s work is politically motivated, including the Russia investigation.

Trump and his allies have focused their ire on Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s deputy director. McCabe’s wife was a Virginia state Senate candidate in 2015, and she received donations from the super PAC supporting the state’s governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

One person familiar with McCabe’s meetings with the president said there had been a small handful of encounters between the two the week Comey was fired, as Trump was deciding whether to name McCabe the acting director.

At one of the meetings, another person said that Trump asked McCabe who he had voted for in the 2016 presidential election. McCabe said he had not voted. The meeting was first reported by The Washington Post.

At their final meeting, Trump offered him the job and told him he planned to give him the role of acting director, and that the president planned to make a rally-the-troops appearance at the FBI headquarters that week. McCabe responded that it would be a risky move for the president to show up at the building after firing a well-respected director, so Trump scuttled the trip, citing scheduling conflicts.

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Though Wray has resisted the pressure to change McCabe’s role, he has begun to alter the FBI’s leadership. He removed James Baker, the general counsel for the bureau under Comey, and replaced him with Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and the acting head of the Justice Department’s national security division, according to a person familiar with the move.

Wray also said in a statement Tuesday that he has replaced his departing chief of staff, James Rybicki, who served under Comey, with Zachary Harmon, whom Wray worked with in private practice and who previously served at the Justice Department.

During the daily White House news briefing, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted the president has “100 percent” confidence in Wray and that it was up to Wray to decide how to handle the bureau’s leadership.

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, confirmed that the interview with Sessions occurred. He was accompanied to the interview by the longtime Washington lawyer Chuck Cooper.

For Mueller, Sessions is a key witness to two of the major issues he is investigating: the Trump campaign’s possible ties to the Russians and whether Trump tried to obstruct the Russia investigation.

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Mueller can question Sessions about his role as the head of the campaign’s foreign policy team. Sessions was involved in developing Trump’s position toward Russia and he met with Russian officials, including the ambassador.

Along with Trump, Sessions led a March 2016 meeting where one of the campaign’s foreign policy advisers, George Papadopoulos, pitched the idea of a personal meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to federal authorities about the nature of his contacts with Russians and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s inquiry.

When Trump learned in March that Sessions, by then the attorney general, was considering whether to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, the president had the White House’s top lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, lobby Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry.

Sessions instead followed the guidance of career prosecutors at the Justice Department, who advised him that he should stay out of the investigation. When Trump was informed, the president erupted in anger, saying he needed an attorney general to protect him.

The special counsel’s investigators have also asked witnesses about the president’s desires to fire Sessions, whom Trump has criticized publicly and privately for recusing himself from the inquiry, though he has left Sessions in charge of the Justice Department.

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Trump believes Mueller would never have been appointed if Sessions had not stepped aside. After Mueller was appointed in May, Trump again grew angry at Sessions, who offered to resign. Days later, Trump rejected that offer.

The questions that Mueller’s investigators have asked in relation to Comey were based in part on information he provided during his own interviews with the special counsel’s office last year, according to people familiar with the matter. In one of his memos, Comey wrote that Trump had asked him to end the FBI’s investigation into Flynn.

After the president’s request was revealed publicly, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed Mueller as the special counsel to lead the Russia investigation and examine whether the president obstructed justice.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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