Jeff Sessions Resists Pressure to Remove Himself in Russia Inquiries

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions faced growing pressure on Tuesday to remove himself from any role in investigating President Trump’s aides and their relationship with Russia, but advisers to Mr. Sessions said he saw no need to do so.

The resignation of Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser over his conversations with the Russian ambassador gave new impetus to demands from Democrats and outside groups who say Mr. Sessions lacks the independence to oversee criminal investigations that might lead back to the White House. He and Mr. Flynn were both early and influential advisers in Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said Tuesday that under the Justice Department’s guidelines on possible conflicts, that personal history should “disqualify” Mr. Sessions from overseeing any investigations.

And Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Tuesday that if Mr. Sessions failed to ensure that there would be no political interference, “then of course he has to have someone from the outside come in.”

Democrats acknowledged, however, that they had no way to force Mr. Sessions to remove himself from the case, leaving them to rely instead on political and public pressure.

Naming a special outside counsel to investigate a politically delicate situation has proved perilous for a number of presidents over the years — from President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate investigation to President Bill Clinton in the Whitewater scandal to President George W. Bush in the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer’s identity.

In investigations dating to last year, the F.B.I. is known to have examined the Russia-related activities of a handful of other former Trump aides, including Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman. The Justice Department is overseeing the inquiries.

During a bitter confirmation fight that focused partly on his closeness to Mr. Trump, Mr. Sessions said last month that he saw no need to remove himself from any decisions involving Russia-related investigations and the White House, writing that he was “not aware of a basis to recuse myself.”

That remains his answer, an adviser to Mr. Sessions said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity in discussing private conversations. None of the recent events involving Mr. Flynn had moved the attorney general to reconsider his stance, the adviser said.

Mr. Trump himself threatened to appoint an outside prosecutor last year if he were elected — not to investigate his own White House, but to re-examine Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails.

Mr. Trump angrily told Mrs. Clinton at one presidential debate during the campaign that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general “to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”

If he were president, he told her, “you’d be in jail.” That threat unnerved both Republican and Democratic legal analysts.

While Mr. Sessions said during his confirmation hearings that he saw no need to remove himself from any investigations involving Russia or the White House, he pledged that he would not be involved in any future investigations involving Mrs. Clinton after he had been such a fierce critic of hers on the campaign trail as a Trump surrogate.

Justice Department guidelines prevent prosecutors from participating in a case in which they have “a personal or political relationship” with a person or group that would be directly affected by the outcome. But there has been wide disagreement over the years about how that should be interpreted, and a congressional measure that set off the use of an outside counsel in some situations was allowed to lapse in 1999.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a prominent Democratic lawyer who worked on the Watergate special counsel’s investigation, said that if more evidence developed in the Russian inquiries was linked to the White House, or perhaps even to Mr. Trump, then the safest course for Mr. Sessions would be to remove himself from the case or, at a minimum, seek a formal Justice Department opinion allowing him to continue on it.

“This is a dangerous area, and one where the attorney general ought to proceed with caution,” Mr. Ben-Veniste said. Any suggestion that Mr. Sessions was allowing politics to enter into the investigation “would be a tremendous blow to his credibility,” he added.

Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, who leads the House Democratic Caucus, said Tuesday that he thought there was already enough evidence of a possible conflict to persuade Mr. Sessions to remove himself from involvement in the Russia case.

The lawmaker said the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions was “too cozy.”

“I think campaigning so forcefully for President Trump compromised Attorney General Sessions’s ability to independently investigate this,” he said.