Trump continues to deride Sessions
Conservative forces want bashing to stop
On his third straight day of publicly complaining about Jeff Sessions, President Trump questions why his attorney general has not fired the acting director of the FBI over his wife’s ties to Hillary Clinton.
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans and influential conservatives rallied around Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday as President Donald Trump kept up his public pelting of the nation’s top law enforcement officer and left his future in doubt.
Sessions’ former colleagues in the Senate denounced the president’s broadsides against the first senator to endorse him.
Key forces in the conservative media, including Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart News, sharply criticized Trump’s broadsides. And even as Trump again turned to Twitter to rap Sessions, the White House suggested the attorney general should just press ahead with doing his job.
Different signals
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of Sessions that the president “wants him to lead the department.”
“Look, you can be disappointed in someone and still want them to continue to do their job,” she said during the daily briefing.
That sent a different signal than the negative tweets that Trump has aimed at Sessions.
Trump’s onslaught continued Wednesday with a tweet wondering why Sessions didn’t “replace acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe,” whom the president characterized as a friend of fired former FBI Director James Comey and an ally of Hillary Clinton. A day earlier, Trump repeatedly expressed regret over choosing Sessions for the Cabinet position and refused to say whether he’d fire him.
Sessions, who has privately told allies that he does not plan to resign, has not addressed the president’s criticism this week. But several Senate Republicans, many of whom had been previously reluctant to break with the president for fear of alienating conservatives loyal to Trump, spoke up on his behalf.
“Sessions is a very loyal man to the president. He stepped in front with him when no senator did,” said Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby. “I think loyalty ought to be a two-way street.”
Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker said: “I wish it would stop.”
‘Sign of weakness’
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham framed the president’s efforts to pressure Sessions to resign, instead of firing him, as “a sign of weakness.” Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who is running to fill Sessions’ old Senate seat, suggested all the candidates for the job drop out of the race so Sessions could run again if he chose.
Limbaugh, the influential conservative talk radio host, said this week that “it’s also a little bit discomforting, unseemly, for Trump to go after such a loyal supporter this way.”
Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council issued a statement in support. And several posts on Breitbart’s home page have been critical of the president’s treatment of Sessions.
The attorney general visited the White House on Wednesday for a meeting that did not include Trump. White House aides and Trump confidants have begun discussing how to move beyond Sessions, while others have urged the president to end the negative tweets.