In just one part of a remarkable interview that, taken together, is sure to be a constitutional crisis in the making, Donald Trump told the New York Times that he never would have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general if he had known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Here Trump is, in all his glory, grousing about Sessions and how "unfair" he was to "the president," speaking about himself in third person.
TRUMP: Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.
BAKER: Was that a mistake?
TRUMP: Well, 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.
HABERMAN: He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?
TRUMP: Zero. So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. 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 can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.
HABERMAN: Rosenstein.
TRUMP: Who is he? And Jeff hardly knew. He’s from Baltimore.
So there you have it. The world is out to get Donald and he had know idea that he would be victimized by his AG pick first and foremost. Hurrumph. Or, alternatively, maybe Trump shouldn’t have stacked his entire campaign with Russian moles. Trump went on to also criticize the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and special counsel Robert Mueller.
But for now, any guesses how long Sessions lasts? Too bad he left that cushy Senate seat to take part in what history will judge as one of the most corrupt administrations in our nation’s history.
