Trump continues attacks on Sessions
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump publicly attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for a third consecutive day Wednesday, questioning why Sessions has not fired the acting director of the FBI over his wife’s political ties to Hillary Clinton.
Trump has already criticized the deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, who took over the agency when Trump fired James Comey, the previous director. McCabe has remained in place while the president’s nominee to run the FBI, Christopher Wray, goes through the confirmation process.
By adding McCabe to a growing list of what the president views as Sessions’ management failures, Trump spurred more speculation Wednesday that he was considering firing his attorney general, one of the earliest supporters in Washington of Trump’s bid for the White House.
The new White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, said on CNN on Wednesday that he did not know whether the president wanted a new attorney general.
Trump began his public assault on Sessions last week in an interview with The New York Times. The president said he never would have appointed Sessions had he known Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In the same interview, Trump suggested that McCabe had his own conflict of interest. McCabe’s wife, Jill, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 for a state Senate run in Virginia from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who is close friends with Hillary and Bill Clinton. Jill McCabe lost the race. Trump repeated his suggestion about Andrew McCabe in a Twitter post Tuesday.
“Problem is that the acting head of the FBI & the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from H for wife!,” Trump wrote.
Trump did not raise this concern about McCabe publicly in May when he interviewed him as a candidate to be the new FBI director.