Trump expresses regret on AG pick; he rips Sessions, probe ‘conflicts’

 In this April 28, 2017 file photo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks in Central Islip, N.Y.
In this April 28, 2017 file photo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks in Central Islip, N.Y.

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision "very unfair to the president."

In a public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Trump complained that Sessions' decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened.

"Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else," Trump said.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James Comey, the FBI director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier containing unsubstantiated allegations to keep his job. Trump criticized both the acting FBI director who has been filling in since Comey's dismissal, Andrew McCabe, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who recommended the firing.

[PRESIDENT TRUMP: Timeline, appointments, executive orders + guide to actions in first 100 days]

And he took on Robert Mueller, whose special-counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential ties between the Russian government and Trump campaign aides has cast a cloud over Trump's 6-month-old administration.

Trump said Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned that investigators would cross a red line if they delved into Trump family finances unrelated to Russia. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over the Russia investigation.

Trump contended that Mueller's selection for the job was a conflict of interest because Trump had interviewed him to serve as the replacement FBI director.

He also lobbed conflict-of-interest accusations at McCabe and Rosenstein.

[RUSSIA REPORT: documents on Russian interference in election ]

When Sessions recused himself, the president said, Trump was irritated to learn where Rosenstein was from. "There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any," he said of the predominantly Democratic city.

He complained that Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Comey be fired but then appointed Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. "Well, that's a conflict of interest," Trump said. "Do you know how many conflicts of interest there are?"

As for McCabe, the acting FBI director, the president suggested that he, too, had a conflict. McCabe's wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia state Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the interview.

Trump's pique at Sessions seemed fresh even months after the attorney general's recusal. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump's candidacy and was rewarded with a key Cabinet slot, but he has been more distant from the president lately.

"Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president," Trump said. "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."

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Trump also faulted Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings, when Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

"Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers," the president said. "He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren't."

A spokesman for Sessions declined to comment Wednesday.

'Not under investigation'

While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the Russia investigation dominated the conversation. Trump said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Comey.

"I don't think we're under investigation," he said. "I'm not under investigation. For what? I didn't do anything wrong."

Describing a newly disclosed informal conversation he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a dinner of world leaders in Germany earlier this month, Trump said they talked for about 15 minutes, mostly about "pleasantries" but that they also talked "about adoptions." Putin banned American adoptions of Russian children in 2012 after the U.S. enacted sanctions on Russians accused of human-rights abuses, an issue that remains a sore point in relations with Moscow.

Trump acknowledged that it was "interesting" that adoptions came up since his son Donald Trump Jr. said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year's campaign. Even though emails show that the session had been set up to pass along incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the president said he did not need such material from Russia because he already had more than enough.

The president added a new allegation against Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounts to an attempt to obstruct the investigation.

Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Comey afterward pulled Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy and was filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president. The FBI has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.

In the interview, Trump said he believes that Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president.

"In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there," Trump said. As leverage? "Yeah, I think so," Trump said. "In retrospect."

The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: "When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn't think about any of it. I just thought about 'man, this is such a phony deal.'"

Comey declined to comment Wednesday.

But Comey and other intelligence officials decided it was best for him to raise the subject with Trump alone because he was going to remain as FBI director. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Trump because he thought that the media would soon be publishing details from it and that Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him.

Trump denied Comey's claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Comey testified before Congress that Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Comey.

"I don't remember even talking to him about any of this stuff," Trump said. "He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, OK?"

In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, Trump downplayed its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.

"The meal was going toward dessert," he said. "I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption."

He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and the Russian visitors.

"I actually talked about Russian adoption with him," he said, referring to Putin. "Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting."

But the president repeated that he did not know about his son's meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Clinton.

"There wasn't much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying," he said. "Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn't much I could add to my repertoire."

Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and by staff members of The Associated Press.

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AP/SUSAN WALSH

In this May 8, 2017, file photo, then-FBI Director James Comey speaks to the Anti-Defamation League National Leadership Summit in Washington.

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AP/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE

In this June 19, 2013, file photo, former FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington.

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AP/ANDREW HARNIK

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein speaks during an interview with the Associated Press at the Department of Justice, Friday, June 2, 2017, in Washington.

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AP/JACQUELYN MARTIN

In this July 20, 2016, file photo, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe listens during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington. McCabe was elevated to acting FBI director after FBI director James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump on May 9, 2017.

A Section on 07/20/2017

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