Sessions says he won’t resign as attorney general unless asked
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — After being berated for a week by President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday he will stay in the job for as long as Trump wants him to serve.
Sessions told the Associated Press he and Trump have a “harmony of values and beliefs,” and he intends to stay and fight for the president’s agenda “as long as he sees that as appropriate.”
“If he wants to make a change, he has every right,” Sessions said outside the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador during a mission to increase international cooperation against the MS-13 gang. “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’ve understood that from the day I took the job.”
Congressional Republicans have rallied around Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, and expressed mortification at the humiliation visited on him by Trump in several interviews and in a series of tweets branding him weak and ineffective.
Trump is upset that Sessions recused himself from the investigation into interactions between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, and that he has not taken a tougher line against his defeated Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned Thursday there would be “holy hell” to pay if Trump fired Sessions.
After meeting his Salvadoran counterpart, Sessions told AP he was “thrilled” with the support he’s received, presumably from lawmakers.
“I believe we are running a great Department of Justice,” he said. “I believe with great confidence that I understand what is needed in the Department of Justice and what President Trump wants. I share his agenda.” He acknowledged, with considerable understatement, “it hasn’t been my best week ... for my relationship with the president.” The two have not spoken recently, he said. “But I look forward to the opportunity to chat with him about it.”
The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, has tweeted that he wouldn’t be holding a confirmation hearing for a new attorney general if Trump decided to go that route.
The committee’s agenda is set for the rest of 2017, he tweeted, adding: “AG no way.”
The White House of late has appeared to be trying to tamp down the notion that Trump wants Sessions out — without offering an endorsement of him, however.
“The president wants him to do his job, do it properly,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Thursday. “He wants him to be tough on the intelligence leaks, and he wants him to move forward.”
In San Salvador, Sessions met Douglas Melendez and congratulated him on charges laid over the last two days against more than 700 gang members, many of them from MS-13, said the Justice Department.
MS-13 is an international criminal enterprise with tens of thousands of members in several Central American countries and many U.S. states. The gang originated in immigrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1980s and then entrenched itself in Central America when its leaders were deported.