JEFF SESSIONS/MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump denied late Tuesday [9-4-18] night that he called Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and made fun of his Southern heritage, his latest push back to Bob Woodward’s upcoming book on the Trump White House. ‘The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner,’ the president wrote on Twitter. ‘I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!’ Trump and the White House have already issued a litany of criticisms against Woodward’s latest tome, ‘Fear.’ Excerpts indicate the president is depicted as increasingly erratic and his staff allegedly is forced to resort to the type of tactics sometimes used to control children — like stealing problematic papers off of his desk — to try to thwart him. Known for his Pulitzer-Prize winning reporting on the Watergate scandal, Woodward has remained adamant that the eyebrow-raising anecdotes in his book are accurate. Even so, Trump, White House chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis have issued statements denying portions of Woodward’s reporting.”
-Brent D. Griffiths, “Trump: I never called Sessions ‘mentally retarded,'” Politico, September 4, 2018 11:43 pm