Since President Trump’s recent interview with the New York Times, there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the personal relationship between the Commander-in-Chief and Attorney General Sessions. Axios is reporting President Trump is discussing a move to replace AG Sessions with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Axios reports:
President Trump is so unhappy with Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he has raised the possibility of bringing back Rudolph Giuliani to head the Justice Department, according to West Wing confidants.
- In internal conversations, Trump has recently pondered the idea of nominating Giuliani, a stalwart of his campaign.
- Even before last week’s blast at Sessions in a New York Times interview, Trump had expressed fury at Sessions — also one of the first prominent Republicans to back the Trump campaign — for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.
- And in a Monday morning tweet, Trump referred to “our beleaguered A.G.” not investigating Hillary Clinton.
Our thought bubble: Trump often muses about possible personnel moves that he never makes, sometimes just to gauge the listener’s reaction. So the Giuliani balloon may go nowhere.
President Trump recently told the New York Times he would not have selected Jeff Sessions to be AG had he known the former Senator would have recused himself from the Russia probe.
Per TIME Magazine:
“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 Wednesday in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.
Despite Sessions endorsing Trump back in February 2016 as the then-candidate was battling Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie in the Republican primary, the President has apparently grown weary with the Attorney General, saying his recusal unnecessarily prompted the appointment of a special counsel into the Russia probe still clouding the Trump administration.
At the time of the endorsement, Trump said of Sessions: “I have a man who is respected by everybody here, greatly respected.”
The Department of Justice did not return a request for comment.
When asked if he would step down from his post following the President’s comments, AG Sessions said he had no intention to.
Bloomberg wrote:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he has no intention of quitting, despite President Donald Trump excoriating him over his decision to recuse himself from the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“We in this Department of Justice will continue every single day to work hard to serve the national interest, and we wholeheartedly join in the priorities of President Trump,” Sessions said in a news conference Thursday. “We love this job. We love this department, and I plan to continue to do so.”
Hours later, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters that Trump was “disappointed in the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself, but clearly he has confidence in him or he would not be the attorney general.”
