By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 26, 2017
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President Donald Trump expressed his disappointment in Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday and questioned the importance of Mr. Sessions’s early endorsement of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, but the president declined to say whether he planned to fire him. “It’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I’m very disappointed in Jeff Sessions.” Asked whether he would remove Mr. Sessions from office, Mr. Trump said he was unhappy with the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from the probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The president has repeatedly criticized Mr. Sessions in recent interviews and on Twitter. “I’m just looking at it,” the president said when asked how long he could continue to criticize Mr. Sessions without firing him. “I’ll just see. It’s a very important thing.”
“When they say he endorsed me, I went to Alabama,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, recalling the endorsement. “I had 40,000 people. He was a senator from Alabama. I won the state by a lot, massive numbers. A lot of the states I won by massive numbers. But he was a senator, he looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ’What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement. But I’m very disappointed in Jeff Sessions.” Mr. Trump blamed Mr. Sessions’s recusal on the Russia probe as the reason the Justice Department named Robert Mueller as special counsel in charge of the investigation. Mr. Mueller’s appointment came after Mr. Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been overseeing the investigation. I've dealt before with the matter of the Russia recusal, so I'll only summarize my point on it here. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation mainly because the news media made a big deal out of his meeting with a Russian ambassador when he was still a senator and had no formal role in the Trump campaign. Because Sessions didn't "disclose" the meeting - as if it was a big deal for a U.S. senator to meet with a Russian diplomat, which it was not - the media deemed this nefarious. Sessions thus recused himself to avoid the perception that the investigation would be politically compromised.This was nonsense. The meeting in question was not untoward in any way, and if people are going to recuse themselves from doing their jobs every time someone makes a big deal out of nothing, then no one can ever do their jobs. Sessions should have told the media and the Democrats to stick it. But the Republican MO in Washington is to bend over to pressure like this, and Sessions followed the usual playbook. I don't blame Trump for being unhappy with him about it.
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