President Donald Trump Friday lambasted his first attorney general Jeff Sessions, saying that had current Attorney General William Barr had been his first pick, former independent counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and the "Russia hoax" would not have happened.
"He would have stopped it immediately," Trump said of Barr during a nearly hour-long, wide-ranging interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "Jeff Sessions was a disaster."
Trump said he did not want to make Sessions, who is now campaigning for his former Alabama senate seat, his attorney general, but "he was the first senator to endorse me, so I felt a little bit of an obligation."
"He came to see me four times, just begging me to be attorney general," said Trump. "He wasn't to me equipped to be attorney general but he wanted it, wanted it, wanted it," said Trump. "He was from a state that I love, Alabama, you know, I won Alabama by a tremendous margin."
But as it turns out, Sessions "was a very average guy," said Trump. "He was so bad, in his nomination proceedings I should have gotten rid of him there."
He also accused Sessions of knowing "less about Russia than I did," even though he, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were seen with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the official connected to the legal charges against then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
"Everybody in Washington knew Kislyak, (but) Jeff was just very weak and very sad, and when the name Russia was mentioned, just the word Russia, he immediately, instead of being a man and saying this is a hoax, he recused himself," Trump said.
Meanwhile, Trump said he "learned a lot" from late President Richard Nixon about not firing people.
"I should have in one way, but I'm glad I didn't because look at the way it turned out," said Trump. "They're all a bunch of crooks and they got caught but I learned a lot by watching Richard Nixon" about firing people, said Trump. "There are no tapes but I wish there were tapes in my case but learn a lot from Richard Nixon and you don't do that."
Trump said he doesn't regret firing former FBI Director James Comey, "and when I fired him the whole thing blew up. They were ratting on each other, they were going crazy. It was like throwing a rock at a hornets' nest. Had I not fired him I probably wouldn't be speaking to you right now, other than maybe I'd be talking to you about the private sector because I'd be in the private sector because this was a takeover, this was the takedown of a duly-elected president of the United States."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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