INS Monitoring desk
Srinagar,08 Nov
US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was fired on Wednesday .The president has repeatedly pilloried his top law enforcement official since Sessions stepped aside from the Russia inquiry in March 2017 reported CNN.
Sessions told the president in a one page letter that he was submitting his resignation ‘at your request’.
Sessions’ departure was widely expected to come soon after Tuesday’s congressional elections in which Republicans retained their majority in the Senate but lost control of the House of Representatives.
Never in modern history has a president attacked a Cabinet member as frequently and harshly in public as Trump did Sessions, 71, who had been one of the first members of Congress to back his presidential campaign in 2015.
Trump announced Sessions’ departure on Twitter. Sessions’ chief-of-staff, Matthew Whitaker, will be acting attorney general, Trump said on Twitter.
Whitaker, a former US attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, had served as Sessions’s chief-of-staff since September 2017.
Sessions departs as the nation’s top law enforcement officer while Special Counsel Robert Mueller, operating under the auspices of the Justice Department, pursues a wide-ranging Russia investigation that already has yielded a series of criminal charges against several of Trump’s associates and has dogged his presidency.
The move left unclear the fate of Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller and has overseen his probe from the beginning.
