Sessions said in a statement that he recused himself because he was abiding by the law.
“To not recuse myself from that investigation, of which I was a target as a senior campaign official and a witness, would have been breaking the law. I do not and will not break the law,” Sessions. “I did the right thing for the country and for President Trump. If I, as a target of the investigation, had broken the law by not recusing myself, it would have been a catastrophe for the rule of law and for the President.”
The President was asked during a Friday morning call to “Fox & Friends” if there would have been a Russia probe had Bill Barr, the current attorney general, been attorney general during the start of the Trump administration.
“No, there wouldn’t be. He would have stopped it immediately. … Jeff Sessions was a disaster. I made him — I didn’t want to make him attorney general but he was the first senator to endorse me so I felt a little bit of an obligation,” Trump said.
Trump added that Sessions “came to see me four times, just begging me to be attorney general. He wasn’t, you know, to me, equipped to be attorney general. But he wanted and wanted and wanted it.”
Sessions said in his statement that he continues to support Trump and will vote for him in the fall, but he said he “never begged for the job of Attorney General, not 4 times, not 1 time, not ever.”
On “Fox and Friends,” Trump said of Sessions, “He goes in — he was so bad in his nomination proceedings. I should have gotten rid of him there,” adding that he “knew less about Russia than I did.”
“But they got him standing on a line with Kislyak … everyone in Washington knew Kislyak,” he remarked.
While past US presidents have largely left the Justice Department and, within it, the FBI, to be independent, Trump has said he has seen himself as the country’s “chief law enforcement officer” — a title typically used to refer to the attorney general.
Barr’s Justice Department has acted more as an arm of Trump’s defense than an independent arbiter of justice.
“The fix is in,” said Honig, a legal analyst for CNN.
“This is an absolute injustice. Michael Flynn lied to the FBI, he pled guilty under oath in federal court to doing that, he took a plea, and then what does Bill Barr do? He says of all the tens of thousands of cases he’s been in charge of in the Department of Justice, look at that one,” Honig said. “And now we see Bill Barr doing Donald Trump’s dirty work.”
CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Joe Johns Kaitlan Collins and Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.
