The Washington Post is reporting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) has told the White House that he might have to leave his post if President Donald J. Trump (R) fired Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Sessions angered the President when he recused himself from the investigation into controversial allegations that the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government of Vladimir Putin. With AG Sessions recused it fell onto Rosenstein to oversees the Russian investigation. It was Rosenstein who made the decision to hire Robert Mueller as special counsel tasked with investigating into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to “people familiar with the exchange” (Washington Post anonymous sources) Sessions made his position known in a phone call to White House counsel Donald McGahn last weekend. Then Trump was reportedly furious at Rosenstein peaked after the deputy attorney general approved the April 9 FBI raid on Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen.
Trump is reportedly considering firing Rosenstein as part of an effort to have Mueller removed as special counsel.
The President wrote on Twitter, “The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!”
While Republicans are increasingly dismissive of the allegations of collusion, the Democrats have filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Russia, and WikiLeaks.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said the Democrats brought the lawsuit over hacked emails because they have seen “a mountain of evidence of collusion between the campaign and the Russians.”
Perez said, “We did our homework. A year ago people said file a lawsuit then, and I didn’t do so because I believe in doing the homework. We have seen a mountain of evidence of collusion between the campaign and the Russians to basically affect our democracy. And so we did our homework, and we brought our civil case.”
From 1997 to 2017 Sessions represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate. Through most of his Senate career he was widely regarded as the most popular person in Alabama politics. He was the first Senator to endorse Trump and played a hand organizing the Trump campaign, lending the New York City billionaire and reality TV star staff and talking points.
(Original reporting by the Washington Post, Breitbart News, and NBC News contributed to this report.)
