This is an utterly amazing piece of reporting from the New York Times.  They got an interview with President Donald Trump, who spoke openly.  The main article is Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions, and they’ve issued partial transcripts in Excerpts From The Times Interview With Trump.   It’s astounding, and important, and simply amazing reporting.

And it’s deeply, deeply frightening.  Go to the Times for the full article.  Here’s just one example:

TRUMP:  Look, [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.
BAKER:  Was that a mistake?
TRUMP:  Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.
HABERMAN:  He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?
TRUMP:  Zero.  So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself.  I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.
HABERMAN:  [Rod J.] Rosenstein.
TRUMP:  Who is he? And Jeff hardly knew. He’s from Baltimore.
________

TRUMP: Yeah, what Jeff Sessions did was he recused himself right after, right after he became attorney general. And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I would have — then I said, “Who’s your deputy?” So his deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. So, he’s from Baltimore….

[The Times put that break in, presumable to show the parts weren’t one conversation.]

There’s so much crazy in that one excerpt, it’s hard to parse.  Jeff Sessions was required to recuse himself.  It’s standard, and both the Ethics Office and the DOJ itself officially concluded that same thing.  When Sessions did recuse, he clearly did it reluctantly, but all Trump sees is disloyalty.  So unfair.

Sessions was nominated before this investigation started, so what Trump is saying is that he’d never intentionally appoint anyone who might ever recuse himself.  It’s hard to even describe how wildly unethical that really is.

And because Rod Rosenstein isn’t reliably Republican enough, and shouldn’t have been hired.  So much for independence.  Look, Trump is openly calling for nothing but unethical hires.  And not from Baltimore, which he feels doesn’t have any unethical apparatchiks.

And he goes on at length, spouting about stuff he wants, and things he’ll do, and so much of what he says is wrong on every level: factually wrong, ethically wrong, and simply and horrifyingly evil.

Read the articles.  It’s too much treason and criminality for me to steal their thunder.