President Trump took to Twitter to announce that Chief of Staff Matthew G. Whitaker will replace Sessions as an interim.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions submitted a resignation letter to Donald Trump, which said it came at "your request".
Before he went to work for Sessions, Whitaker led a nonprofit group funded with conservative dark money that often attacked Hillary Clinton. In a 2016 op-ed, Whitaker argued that Clinton should’ve been indicted and faced prosecution for her use of personal email while serving as secretary of state.
More recently, Whitaker criticized Special Counsel Mueller’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. He wrote a CNN op-ed last year that criticized the Mueller investigation for “going too far” and urging Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has overseen the probe up to this point after Sessions’ recusal, to rein it in. Like Trump, Whitaker argued that Mueller was overstepping his authority by potentially investigating the personal finances of the president and his family. “Mueller has come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing,” he wrote.