After battling Obamacare, President Donald Trump found a new “enemy” to target on Wednesday. He expressed regret at appointing Jeff Sessions as the attorney general because of the AG’s recusal from the Russian investigation.
Since Sessions was part of the Trump campaign, Trump expected the AG to be on his side when probing the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Had he known that Sessions would recuse himself, the real estate billionaire said he would have appointed someone else as AG, The New York Times reported.
Public break with supporters
Trump, after six months on the job, just witnessed politicians he expected to back him up in all his agenda, veer away. Several GOP senators refused to tow the party’s line on the Obamacare repeal. After scolding these senators at a White House lunch, the president next hit the AG.
It was former FBI Director James Comey who initiated the investigation on the Russian collusion. When Comey turned down Trump’s request to stop the investigation on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the president fired Comey. The job of continuing the Russian probe went to Sessions. It would have worked to Trump’s advantage because the AG was part of his campaign team.
Sessions recuses self
Being a part of Trump’s campaign team, however, proved to be a liability because Sessions had to recuse himself from the Russian investigation in March. He had to because he failed to disclose during the confirmation hearing for his appointment as AG in 2016 that he met with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, Reuters reported.
While Sessions insisted that he met Kislyak as a senator and not as a member of Trump’s campaign team, he also admitted that he met the ambassador several times. One of their meetings was at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington where Trump also delivered a speech. The doubts on his impartiality made the AG recuse himself which led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel, as requested by Comey.
Sex acts with Russian prostitutes
Comey was also on the crosshair of Trump’s interview with The New York Times. The president claimed that Comey was allegedly blackmailing him with a dossier. The New York Daily News reported that in January, before the FBI director had a conflict with the president over the Flynn investigation, Comey gave Trump a briefing based on documents collated by Christopher Steele, a British spy.
The reports contained claims of collusion of the Trump campaign with Russian officials and the Republican candidate's sexual acts with Russian prostitutes in hotel rooms in Moscow. It likely referred to the “golden showers” that the sex trade workers allegedly gave to Trump. He said Comey shared the dossier as leverage against him, but Trump insisted that the report’s contents were just “made-up junk.”
