Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on “resignation watch”
With the walls caving in around him, Donald Trump has decided to throw his friend Jeff Sessions to the wolves. Trump has publicly ripped into Sessions, saying he now regrets having hired him as Attorney General to begin with. And now one major respected political pundit says we’re officially on “resignation watch” when it comes to Jeff Sessions.
Trump spoke with the New York Times and insisted that Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation was “very unfair to the president.” That’s right, Trump is now referring to himself as “the president” in the third person. But then Trump goes on to get uglier about it: “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” (link). And now MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says to be on the lookout for whether Sessions resigns tonight.
Maddow pointed out during her show that during normal times, this kind of public quote from the President of the United States about the Attorney General would almost certainly result in an immediate resignation. But as she also said, these are not normal times. As Palmer Report pointed out earlier this evening, Trump now seems intent on alienating one of the few allies he has left in politics (link). Sessions also likely has the dirt necessary to take Trump down over his Russia scandal, if Sessions were to choose to go that route to protect his own legal interests.
So now we see whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions ends up resigning tonight. It would be a bodyblow to what’s left of Donald Trump’s failed administration. What’s remarkable here is that Trump seems to be hoping out of spite that Sessions will resign, even if that ends up being bad news for Trump himself.
