President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that he regrets selecting former Senator Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, apparently over Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from an investigation into whether Russian officials collaborated with members of the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.
….There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!” And I wish I did!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018
The president was quoting Rep. Trey Gowdy, who appeared on CBS News Wednesday morning, also criticizing Sessions, but for not warning Trump he might need to recuse himself from the Russia probe if he were appointed to the nation’s top legal position.
Rep.Trey Gowdy, “I don’t think so, 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. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the country’s….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018
….chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, ‘oh by the way I’m not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too…and that’s how I read that – Senator Sessions, why didn’t you tell me before I picked you…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018
Gowdy has been particularly vocal this past week, defending the FBI’s decision to put a secret informant inside the Trump campaign in the months leading up to the presidential election, and suggesting that Trump “is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard.”
Trump seemed to pin all the blame for FBI mismanagement on Sessions Wednesday, which Trump believes led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump apparently believed the office of Attorney General was designed to protect the president, not investigate him.
Sessions offered to resign last September after the president reportedly called him an “idiot,” but hasn’t yet cleared out his office.