It turns out House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also met the Russian ambassador and then denied it, but she insisted Sunday that her situation is “completely different” from that of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Ms. Pelosi found herself compared to Mr. Sessions after a 2010 photo making the rounds Friday showed her at a dinner table across from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, shortly after she said denied meeting with him during a Politico Playbook session.
“We were meeting with the president of Russia. He brought an entourage in with him. He [then-President Dmitry Medvedev] was the one who was doing the talking,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“The question was, ’Have you met with him?’ No, I haven’t met with him, I met with the president of Russia. Who else is in his entourage, who knows? Presidents, heads of states come in, they bring their party, they barely even introduce them,” Ms. Pelosi said. “This is completely, completely different.”
The top House Democrat called last week for Mr. Sessions to resign for saying at his Jan. 10 confirmation hearing that he “did not have communications” with Russian officials during the campaign. It was reported later that he met twice in 2016 with Mr. Kislyak.
President Trump has responded by needling Democrats about their meetings with Russian officials, first by posting on Friday a 2003 photo of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer eating doughnuts at Krispy Kreme with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“A total hypocrite!” Mr. Trump said in a tweet.
The president also tweeted the photo of Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Kislyak at the dinner with the message, “I hereby demand a second investigation, after Schumer, of Pelosi for her close ties to Russia, and lying about it.”
Asked Friday during the Politico Playbook interview if she had met with the Russian ambassador, Ms. Pelosi said, “Not with this Russian ambassador, no.”
Mr. Sessions insisted Thursday that he never met with Russian officials to discuss the campaign, calling such allegations “totally false,” but acknowledged that he “should have slowed down and said, ’But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times,’ and that would be the ambassador.”
He also said he would send a letter clarifying his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as recuse himself from a federal investigation into Moscow meddling with the 2016 election.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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