Perhaps the most shocking part of President Trump’s interview with the NY Times is that he gave them the interview at all. The NY Times is one of the vehicles the President calls “fake news.” A close second to the fact that he spoke to what he calls “The Failing NY Times” is the POTUS’ comment about Jeff Sessions. Trump told the paper that he’d never have appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General had he known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. The president said sessions decision was “very unfair to the president”–it has slowed down his agenda.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
(…) Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
President Trump also went after former FBI director Comey, claiming the former lawman tried to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Which means Comey learned a lot from J. Edgar Hoover.
The president brought up Mueller’s office which he claimed loaded with people who had conflicts of Interests.
Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself…“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The president also talked about what the media implied was a “secret” second meeting with Vladimir Putin during the G20 meetings. That supposedly “secret meeting” was held at a dinner attended by the President and First Lady, along with at least nineteen other couples and twenty translators. Couples were split up, and Mr. Trump sat next to Putin. The president went around the room to “schmooze” and spent sometime with Putin. Accordingly the media is freaking that he relied on a Russian translator to talk to Putin (the translator brought by the first couple was proficient in Japanese (each country was allowed to bring only one) as the POTUS was sitting near the Japanese Prime Minister and his wife.
Describing the conversation he had with Putin:
Mr. Trump said they talked for about 15 minutes, mostly about “pleasantries.” But Mr. Trump did say that they talked “about adoptions.” Mr. Putin banned American adoptions of Russian children in 2012 after the United States enacted sanctions on Russians accused of human rights abuses, an issue that remains a sore point in relations with Moscow.
Mr. Trump acknowledged that it was “interesting” that adoptions came up since his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year’s campaign. Even though emails show that the session had been set up to pass along incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the president said he did not need such material from Russia about Mrs. Clinton last year because he already had more than enough.
Heck, he did have all the opposition research necessary, all he really needed was a copy of Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash.
The President wasn’t all negative, he made a joke about the famous long handshake with the French president and talk about the fact that unemployment has fallen and the stock markets have risen to record highs since he was inaugurated.
The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounts to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team.
Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.
In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believes Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,’’ Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
The dossier didn’t bother Trump because he knew from the start that it was bogus.
Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.
“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
He also reminded the Times that just before he was appointed special prosecutor Muller interviewed for Comey’s job.
Most of the Comey/Russia investigation discussion was nothing new, but the interview does seem to confirm earlier reports that President Trump was seething angry with A.G. Sessions for recusing himself. It will be interesting to see if there is fall out.
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