Sessions says he’s not stepping down

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — His loyalty to the boss severely tested but seemingly intact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday he will stay in the job for as long as President Donald 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.” This, after a week of being berated by Trump in the most public fashion as weak and ineffective.

“If he wants to make a change, he has every right,” Sessions said in an interview 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 a series of tweets.

Trump is upset that Sessions recused himself months ago 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.

them.

For now, “there will be no modifications” to current policy, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an internal memo to all military service chiefs, commanders and enlisted leaders. That was despite Trump’s announcement Wednesday on Twitter that he will not “accept or allow” transgender people to serve in the U.S. military.

By late Thursday, the Pentagon still had nothing more to go on than the tweets, a highly irregular circumstance that put Mattis and others in the chain of command in a position of awkward unease, if not paralysis. A commander in chief normally works out policy changes of this magnitude in advance in order to preserve order and morale.

Trump’s tweets drew quick, sometimes scathing criticism from many lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, as well as many military troops and retirees. But social conservatives applauded. Protesters demonstrated in several cities

as well as outside the White House.

Dunford began his memo to the nation’s military leaders: “I know there are questions about yesterday’s announcement.” He said nothing would change

until the president’s direction had been received and developed by Mattis into written “implementation guidance.”