JEFF SESSIONS/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “Days after President Donald Trump deemed Jeff Sessions ‘beleaguered’ and threatened to fire him last July, members of the president’s inner circle made a desperate case to save the attorney general’s job. The White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and the president’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, pleaded with Trump during a heated Oval Office meeting to keep Sessions, warning that his dismissal would only pour gasoline on the Russia investigation. And, they said, it could alienate those in Trump’s conservative base, supporters enamored with the attorney general’s tough stances on law enforcement and immigration. Priebus and Bannon both were out of their jobs within the month. But Sessions survived, his reprieve delivered by John Kelly as one of his first acts as chief of staff. Ten months later, the Republican campaign to save Sessions has continued and — at least for now — succeeded. In private meetings, public appearances on television and late-night phone calls, Trump’s advisers and allies have done all they can to persuade the president not to fire a Cabinet official he dismisses as disloyal. The effort is one of the few effective Republican attempts to install guardrails around a president who delights in defying advice and breaking the rules.”
-Jonathan Lemire, Eric Tucker and Lisa Mascaro, “Saving Sessions: Inside the GOP effort to protect the AG,” The Associated Press, May 31, 2018