WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he has no immediate plans to resign a day after President Donald Trump excoriated the nation's top prosecutor for recusing himself from the probe of suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.
"We love this job, we love this department and I plan to continue to do so as long as that is appropriate," he said Thursday.
A former senator from Alabama, Sessions was one of Trump's earliest and ardent supporters and became attorney general in February. A month later, he took himself out of a Justice Department-led inquiry into the election following revelations he'd failed to disclose meetings with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
Trump on Wednesday told The New York Times he never would have tapped Sessions for the job had he known a recusal was coming.
"Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president," Trump told the newspaper. "How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, 'Thanks, Jeff, but I'm not going to take you.' It's extremely unfair — and that's a mild word — to the president."
Trump's blistering rebuke underscored his continuing fury with Sessions more than four months after the recusal and came during an interview in which he also lashed out at Robert Mueller, the special counsel now leading the federal probe; James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired; Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director who replaced Comey; and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed the special counsel.
Trump's denouncement reflected a long-simmering frustration with one of his staunchest allies, but was not a calculated attempt to force Sessions from the Cabinet, according to two Trump advisers. For weeks, the president has seethed about Sessions' decision to recuse himself from the federal investigation into whether Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia during last year's election.
The White House notably made no effort to walk back Trump's comments in the interview or display confidence in the attorney general. Instead, the two Trump advisers acknowledged that the president's public comments largely reflected what they have heard him say about Sessions privately.
The advisers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the president's thinking. The Justice Department declined to comment on the president's remarks.
Read Friday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.