Trump is right to take jabs at Jeff Sessions: Goodwin

President Trump is a man of many feuds, some of them so petty, they defy defense. But in one of the biggest, he’s standing on the high ground.

Trump and Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, are locked in a Twitter spat as Sessions seeks to reclaim his Alabama Senate seat. The president has endorsed Sessions’ GOP opponent, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, and regularly rips Sessions, tweeting Friday: “Three years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down.”

Sessions’ response was revealing — of his shocking ignorance. He wrote: “Look, I know your ­anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty and you’re damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration.”

Oh, please. The kindest way to look at Sessions’ response is that he still doesn’t realize he was played like a drum by Democrats and the media.

Like Gen. Mike Flynn, Sessions was targeted by the Russia, Russia, Russia conspirators in the early ­effort to sabotage the Trump presidency.

They wanted Sessions out of the way, and his recusal served their corrupt interests and, as Trump says, opened the door to special counsel Robert Mueller. Had Sessions refused to recuse himself or resigned, the nation would have been spared the two-year probe, and the illicit attempt to remove the president by members of the Obama administration and Dems in Congress could have been revealed sooner.

A walk down memory lane highlights Sessions’ dopey argument. He was the first senator to endorse Trump, advised him and campaigned for him and, as a ­reward, asked to be AG.

During Sessions’ first confirmation hearing, Dems tried to torpedo him with the racism card, but a very curious question came from Sen. Al Franken.

He told Sessions that CNN was breaking a story “alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that, quote, ‘Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.’”

Franken said the story also ­alleged there was “a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

The documents, of course, were the infamous Steele dossier. The date of the hearing was Jan. 10, 2017, five days after the suspect Oval Office meeting where President Barack Obama approved the plan for FBI Director J. Edgar Comey to brief the president-elect only on the pee-tape allegations in the dossier.

Recall that Comey quickly composed a memo describing Trump’s reactions, proving the meeting was actually part of the investigation into Trump himself.

Someone leaked the briefing to CNN, probably to coincide with the Sessions hearing. Later that day, BuzzFeed published the ­entire dossier, citing the CNN story as a pretext.

Although Sessions was narrowly confirmed on Feb. 8, his denial to Franken that he had any contacts with Russians would come back to haunt him. But the first victim to fall was Flynn, the new national security adviser.

His conversations with the Russian ambassador to America had been tapped by the FBI, and the contents leaked to The Washington Post. Tricked by the FBI in an interview disguised as a collegial chat, Flynn denied he and the ambassador discussed US sanctions, although the topic apparently did come up. When Vice President Mike Pence said publicly that Flynn assured him sanctions were not discussed, the Justice Department told the White House that transcripts showed otherwise, and Flynn was forced to resign.

Now Sessions was about to get identical treatment. The Washington Post again got the leak, reporting March 1 that anonymous intelligence sources said Sessions had two meetings with the same Russian ambassador during the campaign. Dems quickly accused the new AG of lying under oath to Franken and demanded that he resign.

Sessions refused, telling NBC, “I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign, and those remarks are unbelievable to me and false.”

Yet asked if he would recuse himself from any involvement in the Russian-meddling probe, Sessions suggested he would.

The next day, he did just that, while insisting he had been truthful in his answers to Franken. But he said he would have nothing to do with the Russia probe because he was a Trump campaign adviser and surrogate.

Suddenly, the calls for him to resign died off. He was out of the way and that was good enough.

Meanwhile, Rod Rosenstein, a career prosecutor tapped to be deputy attorney general, was still not confirmed. His March hearings were dominated by Dems demanding to know if he would be willing to appoint an independent prosecutor if one were needed.

He said yes, and was confirmed, 94-6. Sen. Chuck Schumer gave a floor speech in which he said that Rosenstein assured him privately he would keep that promise.

Rosenstein took office April 25. Soon, he would write a memo making the case for firing Comey, and Trump dropped the ax on May 8.

Nine days later, Rosenstein appointed Mueller to pick up the FBI probe, and “any other matters that” arise from it, presumably including the firing of Comey.

In hindsight, the plot against Trump was breathtaking in its boldness and venality. For Sessions even now to claim he did the right thing is sheer idiocy.

If he felt so strongly about recusal, then he should have resigned because Trump deserved to have a fully functioning AG. Instead, he got Rosenstein, whose appointment of Mueller and his role in the dishonest FISA applications reek of conflicts and errors.

Sessions can’t fix any of that but should at least come to grips with the national nightmare he helped to create.

Cuomo tries being contrite

On Memorial Day, Gov. Cuomo admitted he was wrong — but not on nursing homes.

Asked to predict when New York would reopen, he wouldn’t.

“I’m out of that business because we all failed at that business, right? All the early national experts. Here’s my projection model. Here’s my projection model. They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”

He added, “We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong.”

The Pollyanna in me sees this as practice for admitting that his order sending COVID-19 patients to nursing homes was a huge and fatal error.

After all, politicians sometimes do the decent thing.

Carranza a two-face DOE ‘bigot’

City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, a race man to the core, wants to add discrimination against Asian Americans to his anti-bias training.

No thanks, says a Chinese-American advocacy group, noting that Carranza himself has accused Asians of “owning” admissions to top high schools.

In a blistering statement, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York said the first step in stopping bigotry against Asians “is to get Carranza out of NYC.”

Over to you, Mayor de Blasio.