Eric Lichtblau

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a conservative from Alabama who became a close adviser after endorsing him early in his campaign, to be the attorney general of the United States. While Sen Sessions is well liked in the Senate, his record as United States attorney in Alabama in the 1980s is very likely to become an issue for Democrats and civil rights groups expected to give it close scrutiny. While serving as a United States prosecutor in Alabama, Sessions was nominated in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. But his nomination was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee because of racially charged comments and actions. At that time, he was one of two judicial nominees whose selections were halted by the panel in nearly 50 years.

The appointment of Sen Sessions is expected to bring sweeping change to the Justice Department as it operated under Loretta E. Lynch and her predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., who, when he was nominated to be the first black attorney general, pledged to make rebuilding the civil rights division his top priority. Several former Justice officials predicted that Sen Sessions would reverse the emphasis on civil rights and criminal-justice reform that Holder put in place.

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Trump and the Russian government.

And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump. The FBI’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.

Documents released in the Hillary Clinton email investigation show intense disagreement in 2015 between the State Department and the FBI over whether some of Clinton’s emails should be considered classified, including a discussion of a possible “quid pro quo” to settle one dispute.

The new batch of documents indicated that in one particular case, a senior State Department official, Patrick F. Kennedy, pressed the FBI to agree that one of Clinton’s emails on the 2012 Benghazi attack would be unclassified — and not classified as the bureau wanted. What remained unclear from the documents was whether it was Kennedy or an FBI official who purportedly offered the “quid pro quo”: marking the email unclassified in exchange for the State Department’s approving the posting of more FBI agents to Iraq.

Donald Trump and other Republicans quickly seized on the new documents as evidence of what Speaker Paul D. Ryan called “a cover-up.”

Computer systems used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services, apparently. The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure in July that the Democratic National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.

Clinton’s campaign said that intruders had gained access to an analytics program used by the campaign and maintained by the national committee, but it said that it did not believe that the campaign’s own internal computer systems had been compromised. The Clinton campaign used the program that was hacked to analyze voter data, but it did not contain voters’ Social Security numbers or credit card information. The campaign said it was confident, based on a review by outside experts, that getting into the program would not have allowed the hackers to gain access to the campaign’s internal e-mails, voice mail messages or other data.