President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Oval Office in February.
According to a popular political news blog The New York Times reported that Shortly after learning in May that a special counsel had been
appointed to investigate links between his campaign associates and
Russia, President Trump berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an
Oval Office meeting and said the attorney general should resign,
according to current and former administration officials and others
briefed on the matter.
The
president blamed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S.
Mueller III, on Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the
Justice Department’s Russia investigation — a move Mr. Trump believes
was the moment his administration effectively lost control over the
inquiry. Accusing Mr. Sessions of “disloyalty,” Mr. Trump unleashed a
string of insults on his attorney general.
Ashen
and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a
resignation letter to the White House, according to four people who
were told details of the meeting. Mr. Sessions would later tell
associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the
most humiliating experience in decades of public life.
The
Oval Office meeting, details of which have not previously been
reported, shows the intensity of Mr. Trump’s emotions as the Russia
investigation gained steam and how he appeared to immediately see Mr.
Mueller’s appointment as a looming problem for his administration. It
also illustrates the depth of antipathy Mr. Trump has had for Mr.
Sessions — one of his earliest campaign supporters — and how the
president interprets “disloyalty” within his circle of advisers.
Mr.
Trump ended up rejecting Mr. Sessions’s May resignation letter after
senior members of his administration argued that dismissing the attorney
general would only create more problems for a president who had already
fired an F.B.I. director
and a national security adviser. Mr. Trump once again, in July, told
aides he wanted to remove Mr. Sessions, but for a second time didn’t
take action.
The relationship between the two men has improved marginally since midsummer, as Mr. Sessions has made a public display of hunting for the leakers
among the administration’s national security officials. His allies said
that despite the humiliation, the attorney general has stayed in the
job because he sees a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity as the nation’s
top law enforcement official to toughen the country’s immigration
policies.
But
he may be losing that battle as well. Mr. Sessions played a prominent
role announcing the end of the Obama-era program that provided
protection to the children of undocumented immigrants, only to see his
boss backtrack on the policy. On Thursday morning, Mr. Trump confirmed
he had reached a deal with Democrats to provide protections for the
so-called “Dreamers.”
This
account is based on interviews with seven administration officials and
others familiar with the interactions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Sessions
in recent months who requested anonymity because they are not permitted
to speak publicly about confidential conversations between the
president and his aides. Politico first reported in July
that Mr. Sessions had once offered his resignation letter, but the
circumstances that prompted the letter — and Mr. Trump’s dressing down
of the attorney general — have not previously been reported.
Spokespeople for the White House and Justice Department declined to comment.
The
president’s outburst came in the middle of an Oval Office meeting Mr.
Trump had with top advisers on May 17, to discuss candidates to take
over the F.B.I. after the president fired its director, James B. Comey,
earlier that month. In addition to Mr. Sessions, Vice President Mike
Pence, Donald F. McGahn III, the White House counsel, and several other
aides attended the meeting.
In
the middle of the meeting, Mr. McGahn received a phone call from Rod J.
Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who had been overseeing the
Russia investigation since Mr. Sessions recused himself from the inquiry
months earlier. Mr. Sessions had stepped aside after it was revealed he
had not provided accurate testimony to Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador during the presidential campaign.
In
the telephone call to Mr. McGahn, Mr. Rosenstein said he had decided to
appoint Mr. Mueller to be a special counsel for the investigation.
Congress had been putting pressure on Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a
special counsel to put distance between the Trump administration and the
Russia investigation, and just the day before The New York Times had revealed
that Mr. Trump had once asked Mr. Comey to end the F.B.I.’s
investigation into Michael T. Flynn, the former national security
adviser.
When
the phone call ended, Mr. McGahn relayed the news to the president and
his aides. Almost immediately, Mr. Trump lobbed a volley of insults at
Mr. Sessions, telling the attorney general it was his fault they were in
the current situation. Mr. Trump told Mr. Sessions that choosing him to
be attorney general was one of the worst decisions he had made, called
him an “idiot,” and said that he should resign.
An
emotional Mr. Sessions told the president he would resign and left the
Oval Office. That evening, as the Justice Department publicly announced the appointment of Mr. Mueller,
the attorney general wrote a brief resignation letter to the president
that was later sent to the White House. A person familiar with the
events raised the possibility that Mr. Sessions had become emotional
because the impact of his recusal was becoming clear.
In
the hours after the Oval Office meeting, however, Mr. Trump’s top
advisers intervened to save Mr. Sessions’s job. Mr. Pence, Stephen K.
Bannon, the president’s chief strategist at the time, and Reince
Priebus, his chief of staff, all advised that accepting Mr. Sessions’s
resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and
rally Republicans in Congress against the president. Mr. Sessions, a
former Alabama senator, served in the Senate for two decades.
The president relented, and eventually returned the resignation letter to Mr. Sessions — with a handwritten response on it.
For
Mr. Sessions, the aggressiveness with which Mr. Trump has sought his
removal was a blow. The son of a general store owner in a small town in
Alabama, Mr. Sessions had long wanted to be the nation’s top federal law
enforcement official or to serve in another top law enforcement or
judicial post. He earned a reputation in the Senate as someone tough on
immigration, and was the first senator to back Mr. Trump in the
presidential campaign.
But
their relationship began to deteriorate little more than a month after
Mr. Trump was sworn in as president, after Mr. Sessions’s announcement
that he was recusing himself from the Russia inquiry caught Mr. Trump by
surprise.
The president spent months stewing about the recusal. In a July 19 interview with The Times,
Mr. Trump said he never would have appointed Mr. Sessions to be
attorney general if he knew he was going to recuse himself from the
Russia investigation. Mr. Trump called the decision “very unfair to the
president.”
Days
after the Times interview, Mr. Trump told aides he wanted to replace
Mr. Sessions. Some of the president’s aides, not sure if Mr. Trump
really wanted the attorney general gone or was just working through his
anger, were able to delay the firing until the president’s anger passed.
But Mr. Trump continued his public attacks in the days that followed, including taking to Twitter to call him “weak” — a word that is among the harshest criticisms in Mr. Trump’s arsenal.
Administration
officials and some of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers have puzzled at Mr.
Sessions’s decision to stay on. But people close to Mr. Sessions said
that he did not leave because he had a chance to have an impact on what
he sees as an issue of his career: curtailing legal and illegal
immigration.
In
recent weeks, he has spearheaded the effort to undo what he believed to
be the Obama administration’s dangerously lenient immigration policies,
including the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program.
Mr.
Sessions had no illusions about converting Mr. Trump to his side of the
argument — Mr. Trump remains deeply ambivalent — and he had no
illusions about repairing a damaged relationship he had once regarded as
a friendship. But he told people he felt he had successfully pushed the
president toward ending the Obama immigration policy, and thought it
had given him increased leverage in the West Wing.
The
president agreed to terminate the program, and on Sept. 5 Mr. Sessions
stood alone at a lectern — a moment that seemed to be a significant
victory for the attorney general.
But
his satisfaction was fleeting. Mr. Trump quickly undercut Mr. Sessions
in a tweet by saying he would reconsider whether or not to end the
program, leading the attorney general to tell allies that he was
frustrated that the president had muddled months of work leading to the
announcement of the new policy.
On
Wednesday evening, Democrats announced they had reached a deal with the
president to quickly extend protections for young undocumented
immigrants.
On Thursday morning, taking a vastly different position than the one Mr. Sessions had announced on Sept. 5, the president tweeted about the need for protections for people brought here “through no fault of their own.”
Glenn Thrush contributed report and
SoTechNaija contributed report
