President Trump ordered White House counsel Donald McGahn in March to try stopping Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election, the New York Times reports. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Trump asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?,” referring to his former personal lawyer who had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s .
The lobbying of Sessions is one of several episodes that special counsel Robert Mueller has learned about as he investigates whether Trump obstructed the FBI’s Russia inquiry. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to then-FBI director James Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. The Times reported that four days before Comey was fired, one of Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the FBI. director. Mueller also is examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.