President Trump went after Jeff Sessions again Wednesday — demanding to know why the embattled attorney general had not replaced the acting FBI director.
“Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got … big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!” Trump tweeted about 10 a.m.
McCabe’s wife, Jill, received about $660,000 from a political action committee affiliated with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe — a longtime friend of the Clintons — and from the Virginia Democratic Party in 2015.
But there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton knew of the contributions.
The FBI said last year that McCabe “played no role, attended no events, and did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind” for his wife’s candidacy.
James Comey, the recently ousted FBI director, has testified that Trump mentioned McCabe — who led the bureau’s probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server — as he sought Comey’s loyalty.
Meanwhile, it was reported that Sessions will soon release information about several criminal leak probes.
An official told Fox News that an announcement about stepped-up efforts to investigate leaks has “been in the works for some time and will most likely happen sometime in the next week.”
The president on Tuesday accused Sessions of being weak on stemming leaks from the intelligence community.
“I want the leaks from intelligence agencies, which are leaking like rarely have they ever leaked before, at a very important level. These are intelligence agencies we cannot have that happen,” Trump said.
Newly installed White House communications chief Anthony Scaramucci said this week that he was ready to “fire everybody” to end the stream of unauthorized information coming from the press office.
Trump has been blasting Sessions daily, leaving him hanging as rumors swirl about his ultimate demise.
The president said in an interview with the New York Times that he never would have named Sessions to his cabinet had he known that Sessions was going to recuse himself from the probe of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.
The nation’s top law enforcement official has been hit by a bevy of broadsides from Trump, who has said he was “very disappointed” in Sessions — but has declined to say if he would fire him.
But it appears that Sessions has no plans to step down on his own.
A source told Fox News that Sessions’ chief of staff, Jody Hunt, has told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus that the attorney general had no intention of resigning.
A senior Senate Republican said Trump’s attacks against Sessions need to end.
“I wish it would stop,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday on Washington Post Live.
Despite Trump’s scathing rebukes of Sessions, Corker said he doesn’t get the sense that the president and his White House staff are taking steps to fire him.
He said he was not aware of any professional reason for Sessions to step down.
Corker also warned the White House against any talk about ousting special counsel Robert Mueller, whose probe Trump has called a “witch hunt.”
“That would be a major mistake. A major miscalculation,” Corker said.
