Washington (CNN) When Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, he may cite executive privilege to avoid answering certain questions. 
 
 On Monday, the White House did not rule out the possibility of Sessions invoking executive privilege at some point during his testimony. 
 
 "It depends on the scope of the questions," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, but wouldn't elaborate. "To get into a hypothetical at this point would be premature." 
 
 But is that legal? Technically yes, according to a handful of legal experts. 
 
 Diane Marie Amann, a law professor at University of Georgia, agreed with Spicer that invoking privilege was possible: "It depends on the questions that are asked," she said. 
 
 This will be the first time Sessions has testified in Congress since he recused himself from the Justice Department's probe into Russian meddling in last year's election, and since the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Questions have arisen about Sessions' role in Comey's firing, his own involvement in the Trump campaign and his meetings with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US. 
 
 "There's no doubt that conversations that involve national security in a real sense are potentially protected by an executive privilege," Amann said. "But some of the areas that have been under discussion, with regard to confidential communications, are not classified -- and don't implicate national security. That's much more of a gray area." 
 
 If Sessions chooses to opt out of answering certain questions, legal experts say the committee can hold him in contempt -- but that could elongate the testimony and could potentially take months. 
 
 "If they choose to do so, that could lead to litigation in court about whether the privilege exists and whether its applies in the instance that he invoked it," Amann said. 
 
 The committee can also work with the Trump administration to come up with a solution. 
 
 "The Committee can negotiate with the Administration to get answers to narrower or different questions or to get answers in a closed session," Lisa Kern Griffin, a professor at Duke University School of Law, told CNN. "If they do not come to any agreement, of course the matter could be litigated. The Supreme Court case that describes the scope of executive privilege arose from a similar dispute concerning the Nixon tapes." 
 
 Discussions with the attorney general on topics within the scope of the President's constitutional duties ordinarily would be protected, lawyers say. 
 
 What Sessions will and won't choose to answer "is up to him," CNN's senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" on Monday. 
 
 "If Jeff Sessions refuses to answer questions tomorrow, he's going to refuse to answer questions tomorrow," Toobin said. "It's really under Sessions' control tomorrow which questions he wants to answer." 
 
 Still, for Sessions, there's a great deal at stake politically with this testimony. Reports last week suggested Sessions offered his resignation to Trump because the President blamed Sessions for exacerbating his Russia problems by recusing himself from the probe. 
 
 "The peril to Sessions is a great deal more regarding those conversations with the Russians because he made sworn statements on his security clearances that appear to be contradictory to his actual record with contact with Russians," Toobin said. "That relates to his personal liability. That's what I think he's going to be considerably worried about. He's going to have some explanation, we'll see if people find it credible." ||||| Yet on the eve of Sessions' appearance, a new question has come to the fore, and probably will be put to the attorney general: Is President Trump considering firing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who was named by the Justice Department to investigate the Russia matters in the wake of Comey's firing? ||||| The Trump administration has insisted, as Flores told an Alabama newspaper in March, that Sessions was having these meetings “as a senior member of the [Senate] Armed Services Committee.” At a March press gaggle, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders castigated reporters for mixing up Sessions’s roles as senator and top Trump campaign surrogate. “As a senator he obviously in his official capacity met with the ambassador,” she said. “Again, that was as a senator not as a campaign official, so again, to try to muddy the waters in that way is I think pretty unfair to the attorney general.” 
 
 But the line between his two jobs was often quite porous, and it was not always clear whether it was his role as a Trump campaign surrogate, and not his service as a senator, that drew people to want to meet with him. “He was double-headed all the time, so it was very hard to distinguish,” says a European diplomat who met with Sessions several times in 2016. And that raises questions about Sessions’s explanation of those meetings. 
 
 Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest supporters, hosting a massive rally for him in Mobile, Alabama, in August 2015, just two months after Trump announced his unlikely bid for the presidency. But Sessions’s official involvement with the campaign didn’t begin until March 3, 2016, when Trump named him chairman of the campaign’s national-security advisory board. The first meeting with a foreign ambassador on the list his office provided—with Elena Poptodorova, the Bulgarian ambassador to Washington—took place about a month later, on April 14, 2016. There were no ambassadorial meetings documented in 2016 before Sessions’s March appointment to the campaign. 
 
 Members of Congress meet with foreign ambassadors all the time, as Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, pointed out in a hearing this spring. But when I asked one senior Republican Senate staffer whether Sessions was known as a foreign-policy specialist who met regularly with ambassadors during his 20 years in the Senate, the response was incredulity. “Is that a serious question?” the staffer said. “He’s clueless.” 
 
 “I honestly can’t remember anything he ever did or said on foreign policy,” a long-serving Republican Senate national-security staffer said. “He was definitely interested in some of the issues, which is more than can be said for many senators, but he was not a major or influential figure.” 
 
 In that sense, Sessions was a strange choice to chair the Trump campaign’s foreign-policy team. In the Senate, Sessions had delved deeply into mostly domestic issues: immigration, sentencing reform, judicial confirmations, and budget policy. 
 
 Yet here he was, the unlikely foreign-policy adviser for an unlikely candidate who, nonetheless, by the spring of 2016 was zooming to the top of the Republican primary race. But Trump—who was apparently unaware that Russia had invaded Ukraine until George Stephanopoulos corrected him, and was so opposed to GOP foreign-policy dogma that its leading lights felt the need to publicly chastise him in an open letter—clearly needed foreign-policy counsel, and Sessions seemed to take his role seriously. He quickly became, according to one former Trump campaign staffer, “the go-to person for all the foreign-policy people trying to give their advice to the campaign.” ||||| Attorney General Jeff Sessions will face a range of questions about the firing of FBI Director James Comey and his contacts with Russian officials in a public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 13. (Reuters) 
 
 The Senate Intelligence Committee has announced that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify at an open hearing tomorrow afternoon about questions raised by former FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony last week. The hearing will give members of the committee a pivotal opportunity to definitively pin down the attorney general, who was a key Trump campaign surrogate, on matters relating to both his role in the campaign’s communications with Russian officials and, later, the investigation into it. 
 
 If Sessions is forthcoming, he could illuminate both the larger story of the Trump campaign’s alleged contacts with Russian officials during the campaign, and how the Trump administration may have sought to subvert the investigation into it. 
 
 During his testimony last Thursday, Comey made two key points that suggest lines of inquiry for Sessions for Democrats (and Republicans, if they are so inclined) to follow up on. 
 
 First, Comey strongly suggested that the FBI had information about Sessions’s contacts with Russian officials, well before the public learned of these contacts from early March news reports. Second, Comey raised questions about the degree to which Sessions has actually recused himself from the Russia investigation. So here’s what Democrats should pursue: 
 
 THE SCOPE OF SESSIONS’S RUSSIA CONTACTS 
 
 The Intelligence Committee should try to pin Sessions down on his own contacts with Russian officials as a Trump campaign surrogate, what he knows about other campaign contacts with Russians and why he failed to be fully forthcoming with Congress in the past. 
 
 Sessions has not always been truthful about his own contacts with Russian officials. At his Jan. 10 confirmation hearing, under questioning by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about communications between “Trump surrogates and intermediaries of the Russian government,” Sessions denied, under oath, any communications or contacts with any Russian officials during the presidential campaign. He did the same in his written answers to questions. 
 
 The Senate confirmed Sessions to be attorney general on Feb. 8, and he was sworn in the next day. But it didn’t take long for Sessions’s flat disavowal of knowledge of Trump campaign communications with Russian officials to fall apart. 
 
 On March 1, less than a month after Sessions became the nation’s top law enforcement official, The Post reported that he had, in fact, met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak two times during the course of the Trump presidential campaign, once at the Republican National Convention in July, and once in his Senate office in September. Sessions initially called the report “false.” But soon after, Sessions recused himself from “any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.” 
 
 Four days later, Sessions wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee as a “supplement” to his testimony, admitting to the two meetings, but continuing to insist his testimony was “correct.” But the truthfulness of that assertion also quickly came into question. On March 8, a Huffington Post report placed Sessions at an April 27, 2016, gathering at the Mayflower Hotel, where Kislyak was present, for a foreign policy speech by then-candidate Donald Trump. About two and a half weeks after Sessions’s recusal, Sens. Franken and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), both Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Comey, who was still FBI director, asking him to open a criminal investigation into whether Sessions had perjured himself. Trump fired Comey on May 9. 
 
 According to Comey’s testimony, it appears the FBI knew about events that would require Sessions’s recusal, even before Sessions’s meetings with Kislyak were reported in the press. Comey testified that in consultation with his leadership team, he determined not to share the details of Trump’s efforts to get him to drop the FBI investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn with Sessions, because the attorney general “was very close to and inevitably going to recuse himself for a variety of reasons. We also were aware of facts that I can’t discuss in an open setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic.” 
 
 Chris Anders, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office, says Comey sent a very clear signal with this statement. “It’s hard to read Comey’s statement as anything other than something related to Sessions’ role with the campaign and Russia,” he told me. 
 
 But while Comey wasn’t at liberty to share the classified details he had learned about Sessions’s possible Russia contacts as FBI director, the same restriction would not apply to Sessions, Anders said. Sessions’s contacts, as a Trump campaign surrogate, with Russian officials, are not classified. Instead, they are his actual experience, not information gleaned by a law enforcement official in the course of a counterintelligence investigation, as was the case for Comey. Given his prevarications in the past, Sessions should be asked to fully reveal the details of these communications and whether there were any others. 
 
 THE SCOPE OF SESSIONS’S RECUSAL 
 
 The second key line of questioning senators should pursue, Anders said, is about how Sessions perceives the scope of his own recusal from the Russia investigation. At his hearing, Comey was asked a key question by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.): If, as Trump admitted on national television, he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation, to what degree was Sessions involved in that decision, despite his recusal? 
 
 “I think it is a reasonable question,” Comey said, but one to which he did not know the answer. 
 
 Senators must question Sessions about this, says Anders, not just to get to the bottom of whether Sessions played a role in the decision to fire Comey, but also to elicit from Sessions how he will proceed going forward. That’s because these two things are related. As Wyden told NPR, “If you compare the recusal letter he issued indicating that he was not in any way going to be involved in the Russian investigation, and the fact that the last couple of days indicate that he was hip-deep into the matters surrounding how it was James Comey resigned, I think that is a blatant disregard of the commitment he made to the American people and to the Congress that he would not be involved in the Russian matter.” 
 
 Anders says Sessions must be pressed on the specifics of what his recusal really means in practice. “Does he retain any authority to step in and stop [special counsel Robert] Mueller from pursuing any aspect of any investigation in any way related to Russia and the campaign, or any of the players involved in the campaign?” Anders asked. The committee, he said, needs to uncover whether Sessions believes he retains any power at all over the investigation, given the lack of clarity about what that power encompasses. ||||| "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" 
 
 SocialFlow tallied the total Facebook reach (the number of people who see a post) from stories about Trump's insult tweets published by the 300+ media companies in their database. Here are the insults people cared about most: 
 
 2. Snoop Dogg: Reach: 33,543,619 
 
 "Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!" 
 
 3. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Reach: 17,768,557 
 
 "Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show" 
 
 4. Sadiq Khan: Reach: 13,937,435 
 
 "Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!" 
 
 5. Mark Cuban: Reach: 5,573,256 
 
 "I know Mark Cuban well. He backed me big-time but I wasn't interested in taking all of his calls.He's not smart enough to run for president!" 
 
 6. Chuck Todd: Reach: 3,047,453 
 
 "When will Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd and @NBCNews start talking about the Obama SURVEILLANCE SCANDAL and stop with the Fake Trump/Russia story?" 
 
 7. Chelsea Manning: Reach: 1,517,437 
 
 "Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!" 
 
 8. Sen. Richard Blumenthal: Reach: 554,742 
 
 "Watching Senator Richard Blumenthal speak of Comey is a joke. "Richie" devised one of the greatest military frauds in U.S. history. For years, as a pol in Connecticut, Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam - except he was never there. When caught, he cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness...and now he is judge & jury. He should be the one who is investigated for his acts." ||||| With Attorney General Jeff Sessions appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 13, there's a lot lawmakers want to straighten out. Here are three of the major questions they'll have. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) 
 
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions could be at the center of two controversies in the Trump administration: whether Donald Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to help Trump win and whether the president obstructed justice. 
 
 That's why it's a big deal that he'll testify Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the main committee in Congress investigating Russian meddling in the campaign and potential Trump meddling in the fallout. 
 
 Here's why Sessions is at the center of so much, and here's how he can help us better understand the still-unraveling Trump-Russia-FBI investigation. 
 
 1. He met with Russians during the campaign, when they were allegedly trying to help Trump win 
 
 
 
 Jeff Sessions prepares to testify in January at his confirmation hearing to be attorney general. (Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency) 
 
 Besides Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Sessions is the highest-profile member of Trump's campaign and administration who we know met with Russians during the 2016 campaign and didn't disclose doing so. Sessions didn't disclose those meetings when he was asked, under oath, during his confirmation hearing. 
 
 A day after The Washington Post reported that, Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. 
 
 Why that's a big deal: It's normal for U.S. political campaigns and foreign officials to talk. But former CIA director John Brennan recently told Congress that his “radar” went off anytime Russians met with the Trump campaign because he knew the Russians were trying to influence the election, and he knew they often did that by trying to recruit “either wittingly or unwittingly” U.S. officials to help. 
 
 What Congress will want to know: A lot. Are there more meetings Sessions had that he didn't disclose? Why isn't he forthcoming about these meetings? What did Russia want to talk about? Did he get the feeling Russians were trying to recruit him or others for anything? 
 
 2. He was James B. Comey's boss when Comey said Trump was trying to interfere in the FBI's Russia investigation 
 
 Former FBI director James B. Comey testified about his interactions with President Trump before the Senate Intelligence Committee June 8. Here are key moments. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) 
 
 Sessions is a starring character in the fired FBI chief's testimony. Comey testified last week that Trump shooed Sessions out of the Oval Office so he could be alone with Comey, then asked Comey to back off the FBI's investigation of fired national security adviser Michael Flynn. 
 
 “My sense was the attorney general knew he shouldn't be leaving, which is why he was lingering,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. 
 
 Comey later told Sessions that he didn't want to be alone with the president. But Comey said he didn't tell Sessions why he was so concerned. 
 
 “We considered whether to tell the attorney general, decided that didn't make sense because we believed, rightly, that he was shortly going to recuse,” Comey testified. 
 
 Why this is a big deal: A few reasons. Did Sessions suspect that Trump was trying to interfere in the FBI's various investigations of Flynn and Russian meddling? And what did he do about it? Also, why did Comey think he couldn't trust Sessions? 
 
 What questions Congress will want to know: Pretty much everything above. 
 
 3. Sessions has technically recused himself from the Russia investigation 
 
 Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered to resign his position at one point in recent months, according to two people close to the White House. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post) 
 
 But Comey left open the possibility that Sessions had violated his recusal. 
 
 “If, as the president said, I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey testified, “why was the attorney general involved in that chain?” 
 
 The Washington Post reported that Trump called Sessions up to the White House to talk about firing Comey, then asked Sessions (and Sessions's No. 2, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein) to explain in writing the case against Comey. 
 
 The Post also recently reported that Sessions offered to resign, in part because of Trump's frustration that he stepped aside from the Russia investigation. 
 
 Why this is a big deal: Sessions is a Trump ally, and he appears to be caught between the president and his promise to run the Justice Department in an apolitical way. In his confirmation hearing, Sessions promised: 
 
 “You simply have to help the president do things that he might desire in a lawful way and have to be able to say no, both for the country, for the legal system and for the president, to avoid situations that are not acceptable.” 
 
 What Congress will want to know: Where does Sessions draw the line on recusal? Can he be trusted to not interfere in the department's independent Russia investigation, which is now being led by a special counsel? If it comes down to the Justice Department having to choose whom to believe, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or the president, whom will Sessions choose?
– Attorney General Jeff Sessions slides into the hot seat Tuesday afternoon, to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on his contact with Russians in an open hearing (the open part reportedly at Sessions' request). It'll be his first time testifying in front of Congress since he recused himself from the Russian investigation, and he'll face questions centered around three names: President Trump, Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and James Comey. As a starting point, the Washington Post explains why Sessions' testimony on Russia matters. Axios outlines three "thorny" questions Sessions will face and provides his expected answers. Two involve Sessions' interactions with Kislyak; the third has to do with a Feb. 14 conversation between Sessions and Comey. "This is a big deal, as Comey gave his account under oath." The Washington Post draws up a list of its own questions Sessions should be asked, and they're spun off of two "key points" from Comey's testimony: that the FBI knew of Sessions' interactions with Russian officials long before it became public and a sticking point around his recusal: If Trump fired Comey over the Russia investigation, how much involvement did Sessions have in the firing? CNN asks a thorny question of its own: "Can Jeff Sessions avoid some questions by citing executive privilege?" Sean Spicer on Monday suggested such a move is possible, and legal experts tell CNN he could legally do so in certain situations—if a question touched on national security, yes, about a confidential conversation, maybe not. But it could get hairy: The committee could hold him in contempt if he invokes it, leaving it to the courts to decide whether privilege is applicable. The Los Angeles Times places its bets: Sessions "is expected to support the president under oath and to question Comey’s version of events, giving the White House a chance to push back after days of harsh headlines." Sessions will appear before the committee about 2:30pm EDT. For some in-depth pre-hearing reading, check out Julia Ioffe's lengthy look at Sessions' interactions with Kislyak and other ambassadors at the Atlantic.