Sessions Says He Isn't Quitting After Trump Disparages Him (2)

(Bloomberg) -- 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.”

Sessions, 70, drew the ire of the president after he stepped away from the investigation in March. The inquiry has since broadened and dominated much of Trump’s presidency, sweeping up top White House officials and family members of the president.

“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 told the New York Times on Wednesday. “It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”

It was a dramatic public break between Trump and one of his campaign’s earliest major supporters, a member of the Republican political establishment who helped him on his improbable journey from reality-TV star to GOP nominee to president.

‘We’re Serving’

Tensions between the White House and Justice Department are far from unusual, but Trump choosing to air his gripes in such an open way is different from previous presidents, said an official, who asked not to be identified discussing Sessions’s response to the president’s comments.

Asked Thursday if he would continue to serve if he didn’t have the confidence of the president, Sessions said, “We’re serving right now.”

Trump cited advice from Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein when he fired Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey in May. Rosenstein then named Robert Mueller, Comey’s predecessor at the FBI, as special counsel to lead the investigation into Russia’s election meddling and determine whether the Trump campaign cooperated with the Kremlin.

Trump warned Mueller against looking too closely at his family’s finances. But the special counsel is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe.

Asked whether Trump might fire Mueller, Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, said, “The president has no intention to do so at this time.”

Read More: Mueller Is Said to Expand Probe to Trump Business Deals

Trump also faulted Sessions for his lack of clarity during his confirmation hearings, when he said he didn’t communicate with Russians during the campaign, despite meetings he had with Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, at least twice in 2016.

Democrats called for Sessions to resign after the meetings came to light, and Sessions announced that he would recuse himself from any investigations related to the campaign.

“Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” Trump told the Times. “Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

Senator ‘Shaken’

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, said at a hearing Thursday that Trump’s statements in the interview “have shaken me and many across America” and put the nation on the doorstep “of a constitutional crisis.”

“We have to establish the independence and credibility of our Department of Justice,” Durbin said even as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 20-0 to back Trump’s nomination of Christopher Wray as FBI director. “We’ve got to make it clear that no one in this country, including the president of the United States, is above the law."

Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in an interview that Sessions has been a good attorney general and that “Mueller needs to be able to move forward on an independent investigation.”
Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, became attorney general after serving in the U.S. Senate for 20 years. In February 2016, amid a heated Republican nomination race, he became the first senator to formally endorse Trump.

Read More: How Sessions Is Undoing Obama’s Legacy Behind the Scenes

While Sessions isn’t involved in the Russia investigation, the former prosecutor is actively imposing a law-and-order agenda on the Justice Department that fulfills his career-long goals and Trump’s hard-line views.

Sessions has issued stricter charging policies for prosecutors, taken a tough stance on nonviolent drug offenses, including marijuana use, and pulled back from inquiries into alleged police mistreatment of minority suspects.

(Updates with White House spokeswoman’s comments starting in third paragraph.)

--With assistance from Toluse Olorunnipa Steven T. Dennis Terrence Dopp and Justin Sink

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Gordon at cgordon39@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Justin Blum

©2017 Bloomberg L.P.