President Trump hammered former Attorney General Jeff Sessions Thursday, calling the tenure of the nation’s former top cop a “total disaster.”
Trump appeared to blame Sessions for failing to protect him from government investigations. Trump also praised his own efforts to defeat the so-called deep state and the “scum” in the upper echelons of the FBI.
{mosads}“You look at what’s happening over at the Justice Department, now we have a great attorney general. Whereas before that, with Jeff Sessions, it was a disaster. Just a total disaster. He was an embarrassment to the great state of Alabama,” Trump told former adviser Sebastian Gorka in an interview published in the Daily Caller.
“And I put him there because he endorsed me, and he wanted it so badly. And I wish he’d never endorsed me.”
Sessions has been one of Trump’s favorite and most consistent foils, with the president slamming the former Alabama senator for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took the reins from Sessions after his recusal and later appointed former special counsel Robert Mueller, who conducted a two-year probe Trump panned as a “witch hunt.”
“The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself…I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined…and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!” Trump tweeted in June 2018.
Sessions was ultimately forced out of his role in November, but maintained earlier this month that he still supports Trump, praising him for “relentlessly and actually honoring the promises he made to the American people.”
“That’s why I still do support him,” he said.
Speculation has surfaced that Sessions may run for his old seat in the Senate as Republicans target Sen. Doug Jones (Ala.), the most vulnerable Democrat in the upper chamber.