Donald Trump is angry and frustrated with the federal investigation into Russian meddling in our election. In his view, the inquiry doesn’t just call into question the legitimacy of his election. Now he feels his own family is a target and under siege. Trump blames the highest-ranking members of his Department of Justice for this state of affairs, and he granted an interview last week to the “failing” New York Times (as he likes to call it) to complain publicly.
When Trump sat down with three Times reporters in the Oval Office on July 19, news of the ongoing Russia controversy was unusually quiet. For the preceding 48 hours or so, the White House had been dealing with a more ordinary crisis: the collapse of Obamacare repeal in the Republican-controlled Senate. The White House had been working hard to figure out how to revive the Senate’s health care bill. Just before his interview with the paper, Trump attended a lunch with GOP senators to discuss prospects for repealing Obamacare.
But it was his thoughts and views on the Russia investigation, not health care, that the president sought to get out in the open. “I have done nothing wrong,” he said. “A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.” Who did the president blame for that? His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whose decision in March to recuse himself from any Justice Department probe into Russian interference and potential Trump campaign collusion continues to infuriate the president.
“Well, 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 said. “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 can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”
The president wasn’t done airing his grievances. He mused about how Sessions “hardly knew” his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and complained that Rosenstein was from Baltimore, where there are “very few Republicans.” (Rosenstein, a Philadelphia native, had been the U.S. attorney in Maryland for 12 years before becoming Sessions’s deputy.)
Trump insinuated that the special counsel’s investigation was corrupt. He mentioned that he had interviewed Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, for the director’s job on May 16, after firing James Comey. In their Oval Office meeting, which the president says included Rosenstein (to whom the FBI director reports), Mueller supposedly expressed interest in taking over the FBI.
“The next day, he is appointed special counsel,” Trump said. “I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts.” Because of Sessions’s recusal, it fell to Rosenstein to appoint the special counsel.
Finally, Trump, when pressed, offered a warning to Mueller to stay within the scope of the investigation. Asked whether or not a probe into Trump and his family’s finances would be a “breach” of the scope of the special counsel’s investigation, he said it would be a “violation.” And would Trump fire Mueller if his investigation did start looking into the Trump family’s business and financial dealings? “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Trump said.
But it is happening. Mueller’s investigators are “examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates,” Bloomberg reported the next day, July 20. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office, Joshua Stueve, declined to comment on the report but did point The Weekly Standard back to the original authorization by Rosenstein. That order charges the special counsel with investigating “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” And it’s not just Trump’s finances. The now-infamous June 2016 meeting between a Kremlin-linked lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. has drawn the attention of Mueller’s team.
So what happens next? To fire Mueller, Trump would have to persuade Rosenstein to do so or fire Rosenstein as well. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters on July 20 that Trump “does not intend” to fire Mueller “at this time.” And in contradiction of Trump’s own words in the Times interview, Sanders said the president “has confidence in [Sessions] or he would not be the attorney general.”
In a press conference on July 20, Sessions showed no eagerness to leave his post. “I have the honor of serving as attorney general,” he said. “We love this job, we love this department, and I plan to continue to do so as long as that is appropriate.” Sessions had reportedly offered his resignation in the weeks after Trump fired Comey at the FBI, but Trump did not accept it. DoJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores did not respond to questions about whether Sessions has since offered to resign again.
Where all this leaves the administration and the White House is in a state of confusion and flux. If Trump’s words were meant to prompt the resignations he wants, the gambit has so far failed. If the president intends to act on the frustration he chose to express to the Times by firing the leadership of the Justice Department that is investigating his associates and his family, he risks more than just political fallout and bad publicity—Trump could trigger a constitutional crisis.
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
