美国议员等待司法部长塞申斯作证

U.S. lawmakers said Sunday they want answers from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he testifies this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in last year's presidential election.

“There's a question of his [Sessions'] participation in the firing of [former FBI] director Comey,” Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said on Fox News Sunday. “Then, there have been allegations, publicly, of meetings that go beyond the meetings that he has already declared he had with representatives of Russia's government. That will come up.”

Sessions originally was scheduled to appear before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees this week. But he wrote to Congress Saturday that he wanted to speak before the Senate Intelligence Committee instead to address questions that arose during Comey's testimony last week.

“I assume that this [hearing] will be public,” Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said on CBS' Face the Nation program. “We want to be able to get his side of it, get all the facts out there. We've had a lot of unnamed sources in the media come out and make statements about Jeff Sessions. It would be very good to get it directly from him.”

The Justice Department, which Sessions heads, has been investigating contacts between the Russian government and President Donald Trump's inner circle.