FBI/INTELLIGENCE/JEFF SESSIONS/JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump excoriated on Wednesday [9-19-18] his attorney general, the F.B.I., the special counsel and members of the intelligence community — citing conspiracy theories by conservatives even as he declared in a wide-ranging interview that he is ‘not a conspiratorial person.’ Mr. Trump used the Oval Office interview with The Hill newspaper to unleash some of his most deeply felt grievances against his critics, saying that one of the ‘crowning achievements’ of his presidency will be exposing what he calls corruption among the people investigating his administration…By contrast, Mr. Trump compared his repeated trashing of F.B.I. investigators to congressional passage of tax cuts and the elimination of regulations by his administration, saying that ‘what we’ve done is a great service to the country, really.’ The president’s antipathy toward the intelligence community and the Justice Department has been clear for most of his time in the White House. But Mr. Trump’s verbal assault on his own law enforcement agencies during Tuesday’s interview was remarkable even by his standards.”
–Michael D. Shear and Eileen Sullivan, “Trump Attacks Sessions and F.B.I., Citing Conspiracy Theories,” The New York Times online, September 19, 2018