White House aides confirmed that President Donald Trump was frustrated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but stopped short of saying he would actually fire him.
“[A]s we’ve said, I think that is a decision that if the president wants to make he certainly will and he’s continuing to move forward and focus on other things but that frustration truly has not gone away,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. “I don’t think it will.”
Sessions met with White House officials on Monday, but did not speak with the president.
White House Communications director Anthony Scaramucci told reporters that he hoped that the president and his attorney general could sit down soon.
“There’s obviously an issue in the relationship … I’m not a cabinet secretary so it’s above my rank in terms of how these guys communicate with each other, but we’ll get to a resolution shortly,” Scaramucci told reporters in the White House driveway on Tuesday morning.
Scaramucci reminded reporters that Sessions was an “incredible campaigner for the president” and an early endorser of his campaign.
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway also spoke with reporters, offering some insight into Trump’s criticism of Sessions.
She declined to reveal the nature of recent meetings in the White House about Sessions, but said that the president harbored a deep frustration by Sessions decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation.
“The president’s expressed frustration about the recusal about which he was not consulted at the time, and that he thinks was totally unnecessary because there is the whole genesis of recusal is completely baseless,” Conway said.
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