Trump says he should not have picked Sessions as attorney general

US president Donald Trump has said he would never have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general had he known he would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. In an extraordinary denouncement of one of his earliest backers in Washington, Mr Trump said Mr Sessions' decision to recuse himself from all matters related to Russia was "very unfair to the president".

Mr Sessions announced in March that he would step aside from all Russian-related investigations after he was found to have not revealed meetings with the Russian ambassador. "Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else," Mr Trump said in a New York Times interview late on Wednesday.