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didn’t. Facing Sessions at the January 10 hearing, Al Franken, the former comedian and Democratic senator from Minnesota, appeared to be casting blindly for an elusive fish in his efforts to find a question. Stopping and starting, slogging through his sentence construction, Franken, who had been handed a question based on the just-revealed Steele dossier, got to this end: These documents also allegedly say, quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.” Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do? ? Instead of answering Franken’s circuitous question—“What will you do?”’—with an easy “We will of course investigate and pursue any and all illegal actions,” a confused Sessions answered a question he wasn’t asked. Senator Franken, ’'m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it. The president’s immediate focus was on the question of why anyone believed that communicating with the Russians was bad. There is nothing wrong with that, Trump insisted. As in the past, 1t was hard to move him off this point and to the issue at hand: a possible lie to Congress. The Post story, to the extent that it registered at all, didn’t worry him. Supported by Hicks, he saw it a way-long-shot effort to pin something on Sessions. And anyway, Sessions was saying he didn’t meet with the Russians as a campaign surrogate. So? He didn’t. Case closed. “Fake news,” said the president, using his now all-purpose rejoinder. As for the bad 7imes story, as Hicks related it to the president, it appeared to him to be good news. Briefed by anonymous sources in the Obama administration (more anonymous Obama sources), the story revealed a new dimension to the ever growing suggestion of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to influence the U.S. election: American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials—and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin—and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019997