The Mueller inquiry was a legitimate law enforcement investigation by all standards, except for Trump’s. It was an investigation that Sessions’s No. 2, Trump appointee Rod J. Rosenstein, thought was necessary and that even most congressional Republicans urged Trump to let play out without interference. In addition, the job of attorney general is to be the nation’s law enforcement officer, not the president’s.

Let’s back up to explain why Trump is talking about an attorney general he let go more than a year ago. On Tuesday, Sessions made the runoff for the Senate Republican primary in Alabama. Trump, not inaccurately, saw it as a sign of weakness that Sessions — who until he was attorney general served 20 years as senator from Alabama — couldn’t get a majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.

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Trump didn’t miss an opportunity to make clear to the voters of Alabama, where the president is popular, that they should be wary of Sessions for not being loyal to him. For other Republican primaries, such a tweet has been a death knell for the candidate. For Sessions, we’ll see. His runoff with former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville is at the end of the month.

We’ve long known that Trump was frustrated that Sessions recused himself from all matters regarding Russian election interference. (Sessions’s reasoning: He was a Trump surrogate during the campaign and thus arguably not impartial to what happened during the campaign. The Washington Post had also reported at the time on Sessions’s undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States.) Almost immediately after Sessions was gone, Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, and Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to investigate all of this, an inquiry that lasted nearly two years.

Mueller ended up prosecuting six people in Trump’s orbit, writing a report alleging Trump’s campaign was open to help from Russians and spelling out specific instances in which Trump tried to block the investigation and lie about it. A majority of Democrats in Congress approved starting an impeachment inquiry over the Mueller report.

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Well before Mueller’s findings were known, Trump spent months simultaneously trying to undermine Mueller’s team as politically motivated (without evidence) and blaming Sessions for letting it begin.

When it came to Sessions, Trump walked a fine line. He never said outright that Sessions was fired for not being loyal, instead just hinting at it. And he certainly never said Sessions should have intervened from his recused position to stop Mueller.

Here’s Trump in an October interview with former aide Sebastian Gorka:

You look at what’s happening over at the Justice Department, now we have a great attorney general. Whereas before that, with Jeff Sessions, it was a disaster. Just a total disaster. He was an embarrassment to the great state of Alabama. And I put him there because he endorsed me, and he wanted it so badly. And I wish he’d never endorsed me. It would have been the greatest non-endorsement I ever had. But it’s too bad. But now we have a great attorney general.

“I would not have appointed Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. That would be my one … that was my greatest mistake,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in June.

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And here he’s speaking to the Associated Press in 2018, a month before he let Sessions go:

Well, the probe is ridiculous. Okay. That that probe was even started. Jeff Sessions should have never recused himself. He did it for … and he did it immediately. He should have told me that. And he recused himself. And even people that are not my friends say that was a horrible thing that he did to the president, a horrible thing. He should be ashamed of himself for doing it. He should have told me that beforehand. And if he would have told me that beforehand, I probably would have put somebody else in the Department of Justice. But Jeff Sessions should have never recused himself.

In December 2018, after letting Sessions go, Trump was more forthright in blaming Sessions for the start of the Mueller inquiry:

But on Wednesday, Trump specifically references loyalty — his to Sessions and vice versa — as THE reason Sessions had to go. “This is what happens when someone who loyally gets appointed Attorney General to the United States … ”