President Trump took a second highly public swipe at Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday, an apparent attempt to influence Justice Department investigations that challenged Mr. Sessions’s longstanding view that the agency’s work should be free from political sway.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Sessions “beleaguered” and questioned on Twitter why the department was not investigating Hillary Clinton.
“So why aren’t the committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?” Trump said on Monday on (@realDonaldTrump).
The president’s remarks came days after he told The New York Times he regretted appointing Mr. Sessions in light of his recusal from the Russia inquiry encircling the White House.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, repeated later on Monday that Mr. Trump was disappointed in Mr. Sessions’s recusal.
“He would hope the Department of Justice would look into any other potential area where the law could have been broken,” she said of his Twitter post about Mrs. Clinton.
Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for Mr. Sessions, declined to comment on the president’s latest rebuke but said the attorney general had lunch at the White House hours after the president’s Twitter post, a weekly meeting attended typically by the White House counsel but not Mr. Trump himself.
The fractured relationship between the president and Mr. Sessions — one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters — has prompted speculation about how long he may endure, particularly given that Mr. Sessions offered Mr. Trump his resignation months ago.
Anthony Scaramucci, the White House’s new communications director, told CNN on Monday that the president and Mr. Sessions needed to “sit down, face-to-face, and have a reconciliation and a discussion of the future.”
“They need to speak and determine what the future of the relationship looks like,” Mr. Scaramucci said.
Three cabinet members accompanied Mr. Trump to a Boy Scout event on Monday in West Virginia, but Mr. Sessions, who was an Eagle Scout, was not among them.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, denied a reporton Monday that he was being considered as a replacement for Mr. Sessions and expressed support for him, telling CNN he “made the right choice” to rescue himself from the Russia inquiry.
Mr. Sessions has been forceful in pressing the Trump administration’s agenda in its first six months, enacting hard-line policies on immigration and criminal charging and sentencing, and dismantling some significant legacies of the Obama administration.
Addressing federal prosecutors on Friday in Philadelphia, Mr. Sessions signalled that he wanted to charge ahead in enacting policy priorities “under Trump’s direction.
