So let’s start with that endpoint instead. From The Washington Post’s review of Woodward’s reporting:

“A near-constant subject of withering presidential attacks was Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump told Porter that Sessions was a ‘traitor’ for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Woodward writes. Mocking Sessions’s accent, Trump added, ‘This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.’”

These are, without question, the harshest words about Sessions to have been attributed to Trump so far, and they come to us secondhand, at least. There’s no question at all that the sentiment conveyed in the anecdote is accurate. There’s been consistent reporting about the tension between the two, but we’ve also heard from the president directly. As we did Monday, in that pair of tweets that I had already planned to write about.

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“Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department,” Trump wrote in his idiosyncratic style. “Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff[.] The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now.”

There have been a lot of conversation about these tweets in the past 24 hours, but it’s worth picking out precisely what Trump is arguing.

First, he’s taking issue with the validity of the charges against two sitting congressmen, Reps. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) and Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.). Both were early endorsers of Trump’s, which probably earned them some affection from the president — though Sessions was, too, for what good it has done him. (It did get Sessions his job, according to the president. Trump told Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt last month that “[t]he only reason I gave him the job, because I felt loyalty. He was an original supporter. He was on the campaign.” But whether that’s a positive is subject to debate.)

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Those charges are detailed in exhaustive indictments released by the Justice Department. The case against Collins, filed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, includes text messages, call logs and testimony. The case against Hunter, filed by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, includes a detailed, day-by-day breakdown of spending by the congressman and how his assertions that expenses were campaign-related allegedly were not.

Neither case, in other words, appears to have been spurred by the political leanings of Trump’s predecessor.

Nor does the timing of either appear to have involved Sessions directly. There are circumstances under which higher-ups at the Justice Department must weigh in on the decisions made by U.S. attorneys. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein signed off on the search warrant targeting Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, for example. But in the cases of the congressmen, there’s no indication that Sessions offered any input on when the indictments would be sought. Nor is there any indication that he should have.

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As for Trump’s concerns about the effect on the midterm elections, the Sessions disparagement is simply a smokescreen. We know that Trump would rather blame outside forces for his political losses. Before the 2016 election, he insisted that he would lose only if there were rampant voter fraud, something for which there was no evidence. When he narrowly won, he claimed that two key losses — a narrow one in New Hampshire and a rout in California — were a function of fraud. Neither claim has been substantiated, because, we can say with confidence, neither claim has any substance. But Trump would rather blame someone else for losing.

A Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday makes clear that a loss is likely for Trump and his party in November, too. Democrats are preferred by 14 percentage points in a generic congressional ballot matchup with Republicans, twice what poll-watchers think is necessary for the Democrats to regain control of the House. It’s true that the Collins and Hunter indictments weaken what in July were considered easy reelections, but it’s neither the case that Democrats now have an advantage in those seats nor that losing those two seats would have doomed the Republicans, anyway. Trump is trying to gin up anger at Sessions and using the bleak outlook for his party in November as a way of doing so.

So why is Trump targeting Sessions? Largely because the president thinks Sessions is targeting Trump. Or rather, that the Justice Department, pushing forward its efforts at obtaining justice in a variety of circumstances, has appointed a special counsel who is actively investigating the president. Sessions’s recusal from any involvement in the Russia investigation — a step taken at the advice of Justice Department counsel — is seen by Trump as having been damaging and disloyal. Traitorous, per Woodward. Trump wanted Sessions to kill the Russia probe. Instead, Sessions followed the rules and allowed the investigation to move forward.

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Trump wants Sessions and the Justice Department to focus on advancing Trump’s political interests, which are as follows. First, bolster Trump’s position. Second, punish Trump’s enemies. The Russia investigation doesn’t achieve the first goal. Neither does targeting officials for whom there’s enough evidence of their guilt to convince a grand jury to return an indictment.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s failure to obtain an indictment against Hillary Clinton for unspecified crimes is often cited as evidence of Sessions’s ineptitude by Trump. Sessions would almost certainly be more than willing to charge Clinton with a crime should the evidence of a crime present itself. There’s no evidence that any has. Trump’s focus on Clinton, of course, also plays the same role that his tweet about Collins and Hunter does: He focuses on the failure to target Clinton so that he can undercut Sessions — and punish his attorney general for allowing an investigation into Trump to continue.

Trump doesn’t want blind justice, meted out objectively. As his tweets suggest, he wants to wield the power of the Justice Department in ways that serve himself, something the system is largely built to prevent.

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I truncated Trump’s tweets above. He went on.

“Same thing with Lyin’ James B. Comey. The Dems all hated him, wanted him out, thought he was disgusting — UNTIL I FIRED HIM!” Trump wrote. “Immediately he became a wonderful man, a saint like figure in fact.”

Former FBI director James B. Comey spurred the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III by alleging that Trump had asked him to drop an investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump has since insisted that he never wanted to direct how Comey handled the Flynn investigation. Such a thing would certainly be hard to imagine, a president stating that a leader in his Justice Department should have made political considerations before targeting one of his allies.