Kremlin says Trump totally right that uproar over Sessions is 'witch hunt'

— -- The Kremlin on Friday said it agreed entirely with President Trump’s slamming the uproar over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ contacts with Russia’s ambassador as a “witch-hunt.”

President Trump "said that what is happening, it’s a 'witch-hunt.' After President Trump’s exhaustive definition there is nothing else for us to add,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in his daily conference call with journalists.

Trump in a statement Thursday night defended his embattled attorney general over his failure to disclose during his confirmation process that he had contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the presidential campaign.

"Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional," the president's statement said, adding that the real story is the "illegal leaks of classified and other information" and that the scrutiny of contacts with Russia is "a witch hunt."

"This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election and now, they have lost their grip on reality," the president's statement said.

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also echoed Trump: "I can only agree with the quote which the media have been circulating today: all this is very similar to a witch hunt or to the time of McCarthy, which, we thought in the United States as a civilized country had long ago passed.”

Sessions on Thursday recused himself from any investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. election in the wake of revelations that he had met twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.

Sessions, a core member of Trump’s Cabinet who had campaigned on his behalf, has said he forgot the meetings, which took place when he was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sessions said the encounters were no different from his meetings with various foreign ambassadors while on the committee and that the two had discussed nothing significant. “I think ambassadors are always out to find out things and advance their agenda," Sessions said at a news conference Thursday.

Former U.S. ambassadors have said they don't see anything necessarily unusual in the meetings though they said it was legitimate to ask why Sessions had failed to mention them.

The Trump campaign’s relationship to Russia is under intense scrutiny. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in the presidential election, including by hacking and releasing Democratic emails. The Senate Intelligence Committee is examining the alleged Russian intervention while the FBI is reportedly investigating members of Trump’s campaign team.

Russia has denied there was any effort to interfere in the election, with the Kremlin accusing the outgoing Obama administration of trying to undermine Trump.

A Russian tabloid on Friday urged Trump to take a leaf out of Putin’s playbook for handling the political crisis by adopting the same clannish tactics that are often credited with keeping the Russian president in power.

“Trump must sink his teeth in and not give up his own guys,” Sergey Sudakov, an academic who studies U.S. affairs, wrote in a column for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s most-read paper that generally backs the Kremlin. "Otherwise they'll keep looking for more connections with Russia, trying to set up the new administration as a team of fraudsters."

Russian officials continue to express hopes for improved relations with the U.S. under Trump. But these aspirations are increasingly tempered by fears that with the scandal over contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia boxing in the new president, he is falling back on standard U.S. policies towards Moscow.

Positive coverage of Trump on Russian state television has been scaled back dramatically, and this week, Bloomberg reported that Russian stocks dropped the most of any in the world as investors fretted that Trump’s Moscow honeymoon was over.