Trump fires Jeff Sessions as attorney general

Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned Wednesday as the country's chief law enforcement officer after enduring more than a year of blistering and personal attacks over his recusal from the Russia investigation.

Sessions announced his resignation in a letter to President Donald Trump. He said the resignation came at "your request."

Trump announced in a separate tweet that he was naming Sessions' chief of staff Matthew Whitaker, a former United States attorney from Iowa, as acting attorney general.

The resignation was the culmination of a toxic relationship that frayed just weeks into the attorney general's tumultuous tenure, when he stepped aside from the investigation into potential coordination between the president's campaign and Russia.

Trump blamed the decision for opening the door to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the Russia investigation and began examining whether Trump's hectoring of Sessions was part of a broader effort to obstruct justice and stymie the probe.

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.

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.