Rand Paul: Sessions ‘a Hardliner on Russia’; Hearings ‘a Political Operation,’ ‘Aren’t Getting Anywhere’

Monday on CNN’s “The Lead,” host Jake Tapper asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) if it might be a mistake for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to invoke executive privilege in his testimony tomorrow before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.

Paul prefaced his response by saying it depended on the question asked, but dismissed the suggestion Sessions would have worked with the Russians given he was a hardliner on Russia.

“I guess it depends on the questions,” Paul replied. “I don’t really know what that will be about necessarily. I still think that, you know, we’ve got a special counsel. Let’s let them do their job. The rest is all for show. This is political theater and really, those committees aren’t getting anywhere. If there’s anything done wrong it will come out of the special counsel. And my suspicion is very little, if anything, will come out of there. There may be some people who didn’t file their paperwork appropriately or didn’t file to be registered as foreign agents but I kind of doubt there’s going to be anything that — look, Jeff Sessions, who was kind of known as a hardliner on Russia, so it’s kind of crazy to sort of say, ‘Oh, he must have been meeting with them in some secret deal with the Russians.’ You know, he was known as a hardliner, all right. And so I don’t think any of that is going to go anywhere, but I think there’s a political operation going on and I think dwelling so much on this stuff.”

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