President Trump said Wednesday morning that wishes he’d picked someone besides Jeff Sessions for attorney general, in one of his most direct attacks on the former senator.
“I wish I did!” the president wrote on Twitter after quoting Representative Trey Gowdy, who expressed sympathy with Trump’s frustration with Sessions.
Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation a year ago, bowing to pressure after revelations about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and his role as a Trump campaign surrogate. Trump has publicly attacked Sessions on several occasions since his recusal, even though the former Alabama senator was one of the first high-profile Republicans to endorse the New York billionaire during the 2016 campaign.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump had asked the attorney general to reverse his recusal, frustrated with his general inability to help the White House navigate the investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is currently investigating the president’s request to determine whether Trump tried to obstruct the Russia probe.
“I think what the president is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward,” Gowdy said on CBS in the interview that the president quoted. “He could have picked someone else.”
The South Carolina Republican did, however, break with the president by defending the Obama FBI’s use of a confidential informant to probe connections between Russia and the Trump campaign before the election.
“Based on what I have seen, I don’t know what the FBI could have done or should have done other than run out a lead that someone loosely connected with the campaign was making assertions about Russia. I would think you would want the FBI to find out whether there was any validity to what those people were saying,” he said.
Trump has dubbed the informant operation “Spygate” and accused the “criminal deep state” of politically motivated spying on his campaign, saying it may be “one of the biggest political scandals in history!”
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