“It’s extremely unfair.”
That’s how President Donald Trump described the recusal of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from any federal probe into Russian interference—and possible collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign—during the election. In a Wednesday interview with the New York Times, Trump suggested that he would have picked someone else to serve as his AG if he had known beforehand that Sessions, who was an adviser to Trump’s campaign, was going to recuse himself.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” Trump told the Times. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”
For Trump, the recusal appears to be the first in a long line of events that have led to the current troubles he finds himself in: unpopular, under siege, and unable to focus on much more than the growing scandals surrounding the Russian investigation. In his view, Sessions’s recusal at the beginning of March begat the May appointment by the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, of Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation.
Mueller’s investigation is now probing the recently revealed meeting in June 2016 between members of the Trump campaign (including Trump’s own son, Donald Trump Jr.) and Russian nationals with ties to the Kremlin. To the Times, Trump offered a vague suggestion for Mueller not to investigate beyond the scope of Russian interference and criticized the special counsel’s office’s “conflicts of interests.” He did not say he was willing to fire Mueller as special counsel.
But for Trump to pin all his Russia troubles on his attorney general—a loyal and early supporter whose recusal was intended to shield the president from conflict of interest charges? Now that’s more than a little unfair.
The Russia Investigation Goes On in Congress, Too
On Wednesday the Senate Judiciary committee released a list of invited witnesses to its hearing on Russian interference next week. On the list are two of the participants in the Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalie Veselnitsyak: Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman. There’s no word if either will show up to the hearing. Spokesman Jason Maloni says Manafort’s legal team is “looking . . . over” the letter from the committee. “We don’t have anything to add,” Maloni says.
If Manafort does show up, it’s likely he won’t just be asked about the meeting. The New York Times is reporting Manafort had owed millions of dollars to pro-Russia interests months before he joined the Trump campaign:
Maloni told the Times that the debt was irrelevant to his work on the Trump campaign. “Manafort is not indebted to [Russian oligarch Oleg] Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” he said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.”
Obamacare Repeal Revival?
After 48 hours of pinballing between different strategies for Obamacare replacement, President Trump is back where he began: pushing Republicans in Congress to pass repeal and replace legislation. The effort began in earnest on Tuesday when Trump called Utah senator Mike Lee, one of the two Republicans who announced opposition to the Senate version of Obamacare repeal on Monday. (The other was Kansas’s Jerry Moran.)
Trump’s call to Lee, along with a visit to Lee’s Capitol Hill office Tuesday from former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, seem to have gotten the Utah Republican’s attention. A spokesman for Lee says he remains supportive of some kind of Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill that includes a “full” version of what’s been called the consumer freedom amendment. The proposal would allow health insurers to sell plans exempt from Obamacare’s regulations to low-risk customers, so long as they also sell plans in compliance with those regulations. A “tweak” to the amendment that retained an Obamacare requirement that states maintain a single risk pool was supported by Lee ally Ted Cruz, but the changes lost Lee’s support for the whole bill.
With Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell proposing a vote on a more narrow bill repealing Obamacare subsidies without an immediate replacement on the regulatory side of the law, the White House sees an opportunity to build GOP consensus through the amendment process.
Hosting nearly every member of the Senate Republican conference at a White House lunch Wednesday, the president made an overt and direct appeal to lawmakers. Trump railed against the “big lie” of Obamacare, telling senators they had “no choice” but to repeal and replace it.
“People are hurting,” Trump said. “Inaction is not an option, and frankly I don’t think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan, unless we can give people great health care. Because we’re close. We’re very close.”
At one point in the meeting, he called out Dean Heller of Nevada, who was sitting next to him, for being on the fence about the Senate’s bill.
“You were the one we were worried about. You weren’t there. You’re going to be,” Trump said. “He wants to remain a senator, doesn’t he? I think the people of your state—which I know very well—I think they’re going to appreciate what you hopefully will do.”
After the meeting, Heller said that there were too many “moving parts” for him to commit to legislation, but said with a laugh that the president’s comments were just “President Trump being President Trump.”
Returning to Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon, some GOP senators said the meeting was encouraging.
“The gap has been closed in terms of member objections, but we aren’t there yet,” Lindsey Graham said in a statement. “The current McConnell bill is much better than Obamacare.”
“I think this was a very positive meeting,” Ron Johnson said. “I think the president showed real leadership here.”
But no matter how positive the meeting went at the White House, Trump does not seem to have ironed out the policy differences preventing Republicans from getting to 50 votes. A White House source has expressed confidence that Mike Lee can be brought back on board—but at a potential cost of more moderate senators. That would leave Trump and the Republicans right where they were at the beginning of this week: without enough consensus on Obamacare repeal.
