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WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave his version Tuesday of parts of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony expressing his concerns about meeting alone with President Trump, while emphatically denying to his former Senate colleagues that he colluded with Russia during the presidential campaign.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters aboard Air Force One as President Trump flew back from Milwaukee today that he watched parts of the hearing, “thought that Attorney General Sessions did a very good job and, in particular, was very strong on the point that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.”

The Sessions testimony unfolded as the FBI has been conducting an ongoing investigation into Russia’s campaign operations since July, and special counsel Robert Mueller has been compiling a team of prosecutors to start his investigation.

On April 27, 2016, Trump gave a foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at which he, Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were among attendees at a VIP reception. CNN reported that Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session last week that Sessions and Kisylak could have met on the sidelines, as indicated by intercepts of Russian communications.

Sessions told the committee that the reception area included “two to three dozen people” and said he didn’t remember having a conversation with Kislyak. “Certainly, I can assure you, nothing improper, if I’d had a conversation with him,” he said. “And it’s conceivable that that occurred. I just don’t remember it.”

“I didn’t have any formal meeting with him,” the attorney general said later in the hearing. “I’m confident of that. But I may have had an encounter during the reception.”

Sessions, who had been named to Trump’s national security advisory board the previous month, said he “came there as a interested person, very anxious to see how President Trump would do in his first major foreign policy address — I believe he’d only given one major speech before, that one, maybe, at the Jewish AIPAC event.”

“So it was an interesting time to — for me to observe his delivery and the message he would make,” he added. “That was my main purpose of being there.”

During his opening statement, Sessions told senators: “I was your colleague in this body for 20 years, at least some of you, and I — and the suggestion that I participated in any collusion — that I was aware of any collusion with the Russian government to hurt this country, which I have served with honor for 35 years, or to undermine the integrity of our democratic process, is an appalling and detestable lie.”

Testifying before the committee last week, Comey recounted a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting in which he said “the attorney general lingered by my chair” before leaving the room, at which point Trump, according to the former FBI director, said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting [Mike] Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Comey says that “shortly” after the Oval Office meeting, he was speaking with Sessions on the subject of Trump’s concerns about leaks when he “took the opportunity to implore the attorney general to prevent any future direct communication between the president and me.”