Trump Humiliated Jeff Sessions After Mueller Appointment
WASHINGTON — 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 he should resign, according to current and former administration officials and others briefed on the matter.
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.
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.
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.
The president attributed the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to 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.
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.
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 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.