.. the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry
.. Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.
..Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer
.. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.
.. a false statement that the president dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.
.. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.
.. Regardless of whether Mr. Mueller believes there is enough evidence to make a case against the president, Mr. Trump’s belief that his attorney general should protect him provides an important window into how he governs. Presidents have had close relationships with their attorneys general, but Mr. Trump’s obsession with loyalty is particularly unusual
.. Mr. Sessions told Mr. McGahn that career Justice Department officials had said he should step aside, Mr. McGahn said he understood and backed down.
.. The lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, was convinced that if Mr. Comey was fired, the Trump presidency could be imperiled, because it would force the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to derail the Russia investigation.
.. Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, called the episode “extraordinary,” adding that he could not think of a similar one that occurred in past administrations.
“This shows that the president’s lawyers don’t trust giving him all the facts because they fear he will make a decision that is not best suited for him,” Mr. Vladeck said.
.. Mr. Trump unloaded on Mr. Sessions, who was at the White House that day. He criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, questioned his loyalty, and said he wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey. He repeated the refrain that the attorneys general for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Obama had protected the White House.
.. In an interview with The Times last month, Mr. Trump said he believed that Mr. Holder had protected Mr. Obama.
.. Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”
.. The attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.
.. White House officials have said the letter contained no references to Russia or the F.B.I.’s investigation. According to two people who have read it, however, the letter’s first sentence said the Russia investigation had been “fabricated and politically motivated.”
.. the president said the attorney general had been disloyal for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and he told Mr. Sessions to resign.
Mr. Sessions sent his resignation letter to the president the following day. But Mr. Trump rejected it, sending it back with a handwritten note at the top.
“Not accepted,” the note said.
We Don’t Need a Special Counsel to Investigate the Clinton Foundation
A group of House Republicans has taken up this cause and is pushing for the appointment of a special counsel. In essence, it is a tit-for-tat maneuver: There is a special-counsel probing Trump ties to Russia, they reason, so why not a special-counsel to probe Clinton ties to Russia?
.. This suggests a basic misunderstanding about what triggers a special-counsel investigation: There must be potential offenses that warrant investigation as to which the Justice Department has a conflict of interest that would make its conducting the investigation inappropriate.
.. Recall that Robert Mueller was appointed to take over a counterintelligence investigation, not to investigate specific crimes.
.. There is no structural reason to believe the Justice Department is unable to conduct a fair investigation of the Clinton Foundation. (There may be a credibility problem, which we’ll get to momentarily.)
.. It was widely reported a year ago that the FBI was looking into Clinton Foundation activities — I wrote about it, here, when it was reported that the Obama Justice Department was blocking the bureau from access to key evidence.
.. As the Times points out, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from matters related to the 2016 election, and that recusal is apparently being expansively construed to include matters related to the Democratic nominee, Mrs. Clinton,
.. In the event, such conflicts have little bearing on how cases are handled because the investigation is led by the FBI with the assistance of a district U.S. attorney’s office that does not have a conflict.
.. All of that said, there is a problem here — just not a problem that requires a special counsel. It’s that the president and congressional Republicans are ratcheting up political pressure for prosecutorial action. Ultimately, this will undermine — perhaps fatally — any investigation the Justice Department may be doing. Inadvertently, the president and his congressional allies are giving any eventual defendants a powerful claim that they were charged because of political considerations rather than evidence of wrongdoing.
.. the president’s foolish commentary has already negatively affected the court-martial of Bowe Bergdahl, and it has complicated the possible filing of capital murder charges against Sayfullo Saipov, the West Side Highway jihadist. When political officials prod law-enforcement officials on individual cases, they hurt the prosecution.
Navy SEALs Investigated in Green Beret’s Death Also Under Scrutiny in Theft
Until now, the biggest unanswered question in the case has been why Sergeant Melgar was killed. But new clues are emerging on that front.
An American service member who knew Sergeant Melgar said he was under the impression that the sergeant had stumbled on some sort of money-skimming scheme involving the Navy commandos. A retired senior enlisted sailor who served in SEAL Team 6 said Sergeant Melgar discovered the scam and threatened to report the Navy commandos to the authorities.
.. Cash from funds to pay informants has a way of going missing, military officials said. Skimming money from funds, which in Mali could be as much as $20,000 at any given time, is relatively easy because the service members are often dealing with sources who are illiterate and cannot sign their names to a receipt.
.. surviving pirate, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, describes how Captain Phillips gave roughly $30,000 in cash from the safe aboard the Maersk to the pirates, money that soon disappeared.
.. According to one version of events surrounding the death in Mali, from a military official, one of the SEALs put Sergeant Melgar in a chokehold. When the sergeant passed out, the commandos frantically tried to revive him. Failing that, they rushed him to an emergency clinic, where he was pronounced dead.
.. the sergeant’s chain of command immediately grew suspicious when the initial incident reports said the death was the result of a drunken accident. His friends and superiors knew Sergeant Melgar did not drink.
.. One of the SEAL commandos under investigation is Petty Officer Tony E. DeDolph, a former professional mixed martial arts fighter,
Conservatives Depend on New York Times and Washington Post Investigations
The Trump administration and conservative publications regularly denounce the mainstream media, but it’s striking that they depend overwhelmingly on the reporting of The New York Times and The Washington Post. They’ve been talking non-stop about the Harvey Weinstein case, broken by The Times, and about the revelation that the D.N.C. and Clinton campaign paid for some of the famous dossier on Trump, a story broken by The Washington Post. And by the way, that’s a point made by the Red for the Blue newsletter, which I recommend to liberals trying to get a better handle on conservative news media.