Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a "lack of candor," McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that. Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told. By then, Sessions had recused himself from the FBI’s probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, giving Rosenstein oversight of the growing effort. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Within weeks, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation and related inquiries, including the Sessions matter. Sessions’s lawyer, Chuck Cooper, said in a statement to NBC News: "The special counsel's Office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress." According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate "all contacts" Sessions may have had with Russians, and "whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred." During his confirmation in January 2017, Sessions told the Senate committee that he had not been in contact with anyone connected to the Russian government about the 2016 election. Two months later, after a Washington Post report disputed what Sessions told Congress, the attorney general acknowledged he had met the Russian ambassador twice during the presidential campaign, but insisted none of those interactions were "to discuss issues of the campaign." Sessions "made no attempt to correct his misleading testimony until The Washington Post revealed that, in fact, he had at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador," Leahy and Franken said in a statement at the time. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation after media reports about his meetings with Kislyak, a move he said was a result of his work on the campaign and not because of the reports. McCabe was fired Friday after the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that McCabe misled investigators looking into how Justice Department and FBI officials handled matters associated with the 2016 presidential election. "As the [FBI's ethics office] stated, 'all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.'"
– Long before he was fired by Jeff Sessions for an alleged "lack of candor" under oath, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe authorized a criminal investigation of the attorney general for allegedly lying to Congress about his Russia contacts, sources tell ABC and NBC. The sources say Sessions was unaware of the federal perjury investigation when he decided to fire McCabe two days before his scheduled retirement date. Then-Sen. Al Franken was among those who called for a perjury investigation last year after it emerged that Sessions had failed to disclose talks with Russia's ambassador during his confirmation hearings. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation because of the talks. In November, Sessions told a House panel that he hadn't lied about a meeting in which a Trump aide boasted about Russian contacts—he had only forgotten about it. The Sessions investigation was eventually handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller, who interviewed the attorney general earlier this year. Sessions' lawyer says the FBI investigation ended without criminal charges and Sessions is no longer being investigated. "The special counsel’s office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress," attorney Chuck Cooper said in a statement to the New York Times.