Donald Trump has asked Jeff Sessions to resign, the attorney general revealed in a letter to the president released Wednesday. “At your request, I am submitting my resignation,” wrote Sessions.
Trump has long railed against Sessions, a former senator from Alabama who was an early and longtime supporter of his presidential campaign. Sessions’s recusal in March 2017 from an ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led directly to the naming of a special counsel, which has now been investigating and prosecuting people for 18 months. Sessions at times offered to resign, especially after Trump began publicly berating him
According to President Trump, Sessions’s chief of staff Matthew Whitaker will serve as acting attorney general until a “permanent replacement” is named. Whitaker, who has run for office as a Republican in Iowa and previously ran a conservative watchdog organization, has previously expressed in an op-ed that the special counsel investigation, headed by Robert Mueller, was “going too far” in probing Trump’s finances.
Because of Sessions’s recusal, the special counsel has answered and been accountable to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. But with Sessions’s resignation, that’s changing. “The acting attorney general is in charge of all matters under the purview of the Department of Justice,” said department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores.
