It's one matter for federal officials to ask for surveillance files to be unmasked, but quite another for the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whose name was ordered uncovered concerning his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, to be leaked to the media, ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday.
"You have to prove those charges, if that happened and it looks like it might have, those people need to go to jail," Sessions, who is running for his former Alabama Senate seat, told Fox Business' "Mornings with Maria." "They need to be prosecuted. There's certain things that are improper, certain things that are illegal. One thing to ask for unmasking, it's another thing to leak it to the media. That's an absolute crime and it should be prosecuted vigorously."
Meanwhile, Sessions recused himself early in the administration and insisted on Friday he had to stay out of the investigations because it would have been illegal to supervise a probe of a campaign in which he'd a title.
"That is plainly in the law, in the regulation of the Department of Justice and so I could not do that," said Sessions. "There would have been no support anywhere in the country for an attorney general violating the laws of the United States. It just would not have worked . . . I do agree with you, that more and more evidence is coming out of real abuse."
Further, he said Joe Biden, whose name was linked to the unmasking requests, had no need for the information from a national security perspective, said Sessions.
Also on Friday, Sessions called for a reset on the United States' relationship with China.
"They cannot dictate to us what we do," said Sessions. "They cannot continue to make monumental profits off selling into our markets while they don't let us sell into there, while they're using the profit to build a magnificent military. We need and have to have, like we did against the Soviet Union, a fundamentally bipartisan relationship to gradually and sustainably, over a period of years, to reduce this China abuse. "
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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