“There’s no doubt he’s complained about him, there’s no doubt he has some grievances,” said Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal lawyer. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images Giuliani: Trump won't fire Sessions before Russia probe wraps up

President Donald Trump is unlikely to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions before the completion of the special counsel investigation, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told reporters on Wednesday.

“There’s no doubt he’s complained about him, there’s no doubt he has some grievances,” Giuliani said. “He’s not going to fire him before this is over. … Nor do I think he should.”


After the investigation concludes, Sessions and others might want to leave of their own volition, Giuliani said.

He later added that he also does not think Trump will fire special counsel Robert Mueller or deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

The comments come after Trump rekindled his long-running feud with Sessions on Twitter Wednesday morning, saying he wished he had picked someone else for the job. Trump has fumed at Sessions since the former Alabama senator recused himself from the Russia probe because of his role in the campaign, a move that paved the way for the eventual appointment of a special counsel.

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Giuliani, speaking to reporters on the South Lawn during an event for White House Sports and Fitness Day, reiterated that he hoped the investigation would conclude before the 2018 midterm elections.

He also expanded upon a recent Trump tweet in which the president wrote: “Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt? They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation...They went back home in tatters!”

“He means Hope Hicks, too, he means them all,” Giuliani said when pressed on the tweet. “The worst thing in politics is what I call the collateral damage. The people who believe in you, they come here wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, they want to save the world and all of the sudden they’re caught in something that they can’t even figure out what the heck it is.”

In the conversation with reporters, Giuliani addressed a New York Times report of a March 2017 meeting in Mar-a-Lago between Trump and Sessions during which Trump reportedly asked Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the FBI’s Russia probe. The report said that Mueller's team is now probing that exchange.

Giuliani said that even if Trump had “commanded” Sessions to reverse his recusal it would not have been obstruction of justice. “You’ve got to be able to ask your Cabinet members to do things you think they should do,” he added.

Even with Giuliani’s assurances that Sessions is safe in his job, he left no doubt about Trump’s feelings toward the attorney general.

“You get angry and the day after you remember all the good things the person did for you,” Giuliani said of Trump’s relationship with Sessions. “He goes back and forth on Jeff. On immigration, Jeff’s done a good job.”

“I’ve advised him from the very beginning, as a friend, not even as a lawyer…why would you put up a red herring” by firing Sessions, Giuliani said.

And Giuliani dismissed the notion that Trump’s attacks kept Sessions from being able to perform the job.

“If he wasn’t, he’d leave,” Giuliani said.