INTERVIEW

declined to comment

But Trump insisted to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon that he was not troubled that Sessions had spoken to Mueller’s investigators.

The president also was asked whether Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI who replaced Comey, had threatened to resign because Trump and Sessions were pressuring him to clear the bureau of loyalists to Comey, as reported by the website Axios late Monday.

“He didn’t at all,” Trump said of Wray. Asked again, the president added: “He did not even a little bit. Nope.”

Wray’s tenure has been fraught as the president has repeatedly fanned suspicion about whether the FBI’s work is politically motivated. But he stopped short of threatening to quit, a person familiar with the events said. Wray told Sessions that he needed to move at his own pace to make changes within the FBI, and that if the president and the attorney general wanted replacements made more quickly, someone else would have to do it, the person said.

Flynn resigned last February after it was reported that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials about his communications with the Russian ambassador. Late last year, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Trump fired Comey in May, several days after the then-FBI director told Congress he could not comment on whether there was evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Comey later testified that the president had asked him several months earlier whether he could see a way to “letting Flynn go.”

Trump has told his team of lawyers that he is not worried about being interviewed, because he has done nothing wrong, according to people familiar with his views. However, some of Trump’s close advisers and friends fear a face-to-face interview with Mueller could put the president in legal jeopardy. A central worry, they say, is Trump’s lack of precision in his speech and his penchant for hyperbole.