article: During his testimony before the Senate committee investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, he was often evasive. His accounting of details was uncertain, littered with "I don't recalls" and "I have no recollections". Mr Sessions is far from the first politician to seek refuge in a fuzzy memory under sharp questioning. Definitive statements proven inaccurate under oath are more prone to accusations of perjury. When it came time to discuss his conversations with the president, Mr Sessions demurred, noting that he wanted to give Mr Trump the opportunity to review the question before sharing his thoughts. It was as if the attorney general was trying to pre-emptively invoke executive privilege - the right of a president to candid counsel from his advisers - without using those magic words. Where Mr Sessions's memory did serve him well, he forcefully condemned allegations of Russian collusion as "appalling and detestable". The controversy at this point is about more than just collusion, however. It's about obstruction of justice and the circumstances around the firing of an FBI director. In those areas the attorney general did little to turn down the heat. Going into Mr Sessions's testimony on Tuesday, there were some obvious questions he would face. Here's a look at how he answered (or, occasionally, didn't answer) them. The scene was the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. The date was 27 April 2016. The event was a high-profile foreign policy speech by then-candidate Trump. Mr Sessions was in attendance, and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was sitting in the front row. According to the attorney general's testimony, however, he didn't know Mr Kislyak was in the room (although a photograph showed them just a few metres apart at one point and reporters in the back of the room were buzzing about his presence). He said he didn't recall if he had any conversation with the ambassador, although it was "conceivable". "I can assure you nothing improper, if I had a conversation with him," Mr Sessions said. It was undisclosed meetings with Mr Kislyak - who is considered by some to be the top Russian spymaster in the US - that is widely considered to be behind Mr Sessions's February announcement that he would recuse himself from the Justice Department's investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mr Sessions on Tuesday, however, said that his recusal was a result of Justice Department rules preventing him from overseeing an investigation into a campaign he was part of and not due to any personal activity. It was a blockbuster story in the New York Times and one of the most gripping moments of last week's testimony from ex-FBI boss James Comey. On 14 February, the former director said he was held back by the president during a national security meeting in the White House and, in private, pressured to curtail the ongoing FBI investigation into Mr Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. On Tuesday Mr Sessions, at least in part, corroborated Mr Comey's account. "We were there and I was standing there
summary: The glimpse Jeff Sessions offered into the controversies bedevilling the Trump administration came through a glass, darkly.