On Wednesday, as Republicans were clamoring to make public a secret document they think will undercut the investigation into Russian meddling, President Trump made clear his desire: Release the memo.

Trump’s directive was at odds with his own Justice Department, which had warned that releasing the classified memo written by congressional Republicans would be “extraordinarily reckless” without an official review. Nevertheless, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly relayed the president’s view to Attorney General Jeff Sessions — although the decision to release the document ultimately lies with Congress.

Kelly and Sessions spoke twice that day — in person during a small-group afternoon meeting and over the phone later that evening — and Kelly conveyed Trump’s desire, a senior administration official said.

Trump and his Republican allies have placed special emphasis on the classified memo, which was written by staff members for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and suggests that the FBI may have relied on politically motivated or questionable sources to justify its request for a secret surveillance warrant in the investigation’s early phase. Democrats have characterized the memo as misleading talking points designed to smear the FBI. They said it inaccurately summarizes investigative materials that also are classified.

Trump “is inclined to have that released just because it will shed light,” said a senior administration official who was speaking on the condition of anonymity to recount private conversations. “Apparently all the rumors are that it will shed light, it will help the investigators come to a conclusion.”

The intervention with Sessions, which has not previously been reported, marked another example of the president’s year-long attempts to shape and influence an investigation that is fundamentally outside his control. Trump, appearing frustrated and at times angry, has complained to confidants and aides in recent weeks that he does not understand why he cannot simply give orders to “my guys” at what he sometimes calls the “Trump Justice Department,” two people familiar with the president’s comments said.

Such complaints, and Trump’s repeated attempts to pressure senior law enforcement officials through firings or other means, have now become one of the main focuses of the investigation — including Trump’s order last summer to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which prompted White House counsel Donald McGahn to threaten to quit before Trump backed down.

Trump recently revived his complaints that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein was not properly supervising Mueller’s probe, and suggested that he should fire Rosenstein — a highly controversial action against the person officially overseeing the special counsel’s investigation, an adviser who speaks frequently with Trump said. 

The president also made clear in recent days that he hopes that new questions facing the investigation allow him or his associates to make changes at the Justice Department, two people familiar with Trump’s comments said.

The president has told close advisers that the memo is starting to make people realize how the FBI and the Mueller probe are biased against him, and that it could provide him with grounds for either firing or forcing Rosenstein to leave, according to one person familiar with his remarks. He has privately derided Rosenstein as “the Democrat from Baltimore.” Rosenstein is not a Democrat. He was appointed as a U.S. attorney in Maryland by President George W. Bush and was kept in that post by President Barack Obama.

One senior White House official said he personally had not heard the president make comments about getting rid of Rosenstein, which were first reported by CNN.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

As Mueller narrows his probe — homing in on the ways Trump may have tried to impede the Russia investigation — a common thread ties many of the incidents together: a president accustomed to functioning as the executive of a private family business who does not seem to understand that his subordinates have sworn an oath to the Constitution rather than to him. 

On Wednesday, speaking briefly to reporters, Trump defended his actions in the probe as “fighting back” against unfair allegations. “Oh, well, ‘Did he fight back?’ ” Trump said. “You fight back, ‘Oh, it’s obstruction.’ ”

The Russia probe has also figured prominently in Trump’s souring relationships with some former allies and confidants. Trump first became enraged with Sessions after the attorney general recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, which Trump thinks led to the appointment of Mueller. Later, after his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, accused Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, of a “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” meeting with a Russian lawyer in a new book, the furious president cast Bannon out of his orbit, as well. 

Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general whom Trump fired early last year for failing to enforce his travel ban, said in an interview that Trump’s behavior — from his June decision to call for Mueller’s firing to other meddling throughout the year — is “beyond unusual” and “really dangerous.” 

“If you get to what’s most essential and important and, I think, really damaging to our country, beyond just the confines of this administration, it’s this attack on our democratic institutions and particularly the Department of Justice,” she said. “It is a firm tradition at the Department of Justice that the White House just has absolutely no involvement in criminal investigations or prosecutions, period.”

She added: “It seems like there are almost weekly efforts to try to get DOJ to open up a case on his former political rival. . . . The near daily attacks on the FBI — we’ve never seen anything anywhere close to this before.” 

Indeed, Trump has shown a repeated pattern of attempting to regain control of the Russia investigation and deploy the Justice Department for his own protection and personal gain — comments and actions Mueller’s team could include in the obstruction-of-justice portion of their probe. 

The problem, said Barry Bennett, a former senior adviser on the Trump campaign, is that subordinates sometimes confuse Trump’s angry venting for actual administration directives. 

“Some people still either don’t understand the difference between the president’s bark and his bite, or they’re more than willing to take advantage of the bark to assume that it was a bite,” Bennett said. “Trust me, everybody on the campaign was ‘fired’ more than once, but it never really happened.”

The arc of a potential case of obstruction of justice stretches back to the earliest days of Trump’s presidency.

In January 2017, at a one-on-one dinner, then-FBI Director James B. Comey said, Trump told him: “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.” A month later, in February, Trump dismissed others from the Oval Office and told Comey that Michael Flynn — Trump’s former national security adviser who was fired for misleading Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russians — had done nothing wrong, according to Comey’s testimony to Congress.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said at the time, according to Comey. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Then, in phone calls in March and April, Trump told Comey that he needed him to lift the “cloud” of the Russia investigation and “get out” that Trump personally was not under investigation.

And then on May 9, an angry Trump finally fired the FBI director. 

Shortly after dismissing Comey, the president asked Andrew McCabe, his acting FBI director, whom he voted for in the 2016 election, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. In December, when The Washington Post reported that McCabe intended to retire in early 2018 once he becomes fully eligible for his pension benefits, Trump took to Twitter to criticize him.

A person who has spoken with Mueller’s team said investigators’ questions seemed at least partially designed to probe potential obstruction from Trump. 

“The questions are about who was where in every meeting, what happened before and after, what the president was saying as he made decisions,” this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to recount a private session.

This person added that while it seemed unlikely Mueller’s team would yield any evidence of a coordinated effort to aid the Russians — “If you were on the campaign, you know we couldn’t even collude with ourselves,” he said — the investigators might find more details to support obstruction of justice. 

By June, Trump had so openly begun discussing firing Mueller that Bannon and Reince Priebus, who was then chief of staff, grew “incredibly concerned,” huddling to strategize about how to dissuade the president and enlisting others to intervene with him.

In mid-June, Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the conservative Newsmax Media and a longtime Trump confidant, voiced those concerns publicly, telling PBS “NewsHour,” “I think he’s perhaps terminating the special counsel.”

And that same month, Trump did, in fact, order McGahn to fire Mueller, a directive first reported Thursday by the New York Times. But McGahn told West Wing staff — though not the president — that he would quit before carrying out Trump’s directive, and the president ultimately backed down, people familiar with the events said.

Allies of the president said that his demands for absolute loyalty are not unreasonable — and not indicative of any attempts to obstruct justice. “Of course the president ought to be able to expect loyalty,” said Newt Gingrich, an unofficial Trump adviser. “He is the chosen president of the United States by the American people, and he is the chief executive. If they’re not loyal to him, who the hell are they supposed to be loyal to?”

In recent weeks, Mueller’s team has questioned White House staff about the June episode in which Trump expressed interest in firing Mueller, a person familiar with those interviews said. 

Mueller has also asked about Trump’s repeated outbursts against his attorney general, including a moment in late July when Trump nearly ousted Sessions out of anger at the Russia probe. Although McGahn had called Sessions at Trump’s request in early March to urge him not to recuse himself, Sessions stepped aside that same day — and the president was furious.  

By July 19, Trump was venting publicly, telling the Times that it was “very unfair” of Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation and that he would not have nominated Sessions to be attorney general if he had known of his plans. 

The next day, facing Trump’s public criticism, Sessions announced that he would remain attorney general “as long as it is appropriate.” That same day, a White House adviser told a Post reporter that Trump was “stunned” that Sessions had not yet quit. The president, this adviser added, has been hoping that Sessions would be embarrassed enough by Trump’s scathing public remarks to leave on his own. 

Shortly after, Trump issued a directive to Priebus: Go to Sessions and secure his resignation, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

But Priebus hesitated, declining to outright ask Sessions to quit and instead working to manage Trump’s anger, those two people said. In the following days, Republicans rallied to Sessions’s defense, and Trump backed off.

A person who has interacted with Mueller’s team said the prosecutors seem to be pursuing a theory that Trump’s actions over months have followed a consistent pattern. “Their theory appears to be that he goes after people who are not loyal,” this person said. “He wants in place people who are loyal, to make sure he doesn’t get in trouble in the investigation.”

This person added that key episodes in this narrative include Trump’s order that Sessions not recuse himself from the investigation; the firing of Comey; his efforts to intervene to get the Flynn investigation dropped; and then, above all, Trump’s dictation aboard Air Force One in July of a misleading statement to be released by his son, Don Jr., about his meeting with the Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the campaign — “the most obvious obstructive act,” this person said.

To prove obstruction of justice, Mueller would have to show that Trump didn’t just act to derail the investigation but did so with a corrupt motive, such as an effort to hide his own misdeeds. Legal experts are divided over whether the Constitution allows for the president to be indicted while in office. As a result, Mueller might seek to outline his findings about Trump’s actions in a written report rather than bring them in court through criminal charges. It would probably fall to Rosenstein to decide whether to submit the report to Congress, which has the power to open impeachment proceedings.

As Trump faced growing questions about myriad concerns from his June directive to fire Mueller to his more recent grousing about Rosenstein, the White House was largely silent. In response to several specific queries, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley offered a written statement that addressed few of them.

“The president has been clear publicly and privately that he wants absolute transparency throughout this process,” Gidley said in the statement. “Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the FBI have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton. The president has said repeatedly for months there is no consideration of terminating the special counsel.”

Philip Rucker and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

President Trump will deliver his first State of the Union address Tuesday at a juncture of opportunity and peril for his presidency, and his anxious allies hope he will show he has the ability to do something he has not done before: bring the country together.

White House officials have offered few details of what Trump will say other than that he will take credit for a healthier economy and tie its continued growth to the Republicans’ new tax plan, as well as argue his case on immigration, trade, infrastructure and national security.

In tone, they say, it will not be like the fiery populist inaugural address, in which Trump offered a dark picture of “American carnage.” A senior administration official who has been involved in the drafting promised “a speech that resonates with our American values and unites us with patriotism.”

With its bumper-sticker-ready theme of “building a safe, strong and proud America,” the address is expected to resemble the vision of a “renewal of the American spirit” that Trump offered in his well-received speech to a joint session of Congress last February. It also will come on the heels of the pragmatic, upbeat speech he delivered Friday to a skeptical audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The president has for months been making notes on points and phrases he thinks will resonate and sending those snippets to his staff, another aide said.

Yet it will be an incongruous picture the American public sees Tuesday night: a divisive chief executive, who has discarded countless norms, performing one of the most traditional of presidential rituals — an hour or so during which, uninterrupted and unfiltered, he can claim ownership for his accomplishments and set an agenda for the year ahead.

Democrats, meanwhile, have chosen Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.), a charismatic new political star who has a universally known family name, to give their official response.

The larger question is whether Trump can expand his appeal beyond his ardent base to reach the majority of Americans who are responsible for his historically poor job-approval ratings.

“Coming off the tax cuts and the trip to Switzerland, he’s in a position to be very presidential, and my hope is he will speak as the leader of the country and would offer a series of proposals that would bring us together,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump adviser and defender. “I don’t think this year he needs to speak to part of America. He needs to speak as president.”

Republican Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire governor and U.S. senator, counseled that Trump should tamp down his tendencies to personalize every issue and instead look outward: “Optimism is the key word — optimism that isn’t self-congratulatory, hopefully.”

The stakes for his party are high as Republicans approach an election season with Democrats increasingly bullish about their prospects of winning back one or both houses of Congress. That would break the Republican lock on power in Washington, thwart the president’s ability to enact his agenda and imperil a second Trump term.

Regardless of whether Trump mentions it, an unseen presence looming in the House chamber will be special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The inquiry appears to have reached a critical phase, with the possibility that the president himself may soon be interviewed by investigators.

Such a situation is not without precedent, and presidents have handled it in different ways. In his 1974 State of the Union speech, President Richard Nixon made what would turn out to be a futile effort to stanch the scandal that was engulfing his presidency by addressing it directly.

“I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end,” Nixon said. “One year of Watergate is enough.”

President Bill Clinton made his 1998 address less than a week after most of the nation heard the name Monica Lewinsky for the first time. Speculation was high that his resignation might be imminent.

The day before the speech, frantic aides scheduled a public appearance at which reporters would have an opportunity to question him, in the hopes that it would relieve some of the pressure. It was at that event that Clinton memorably — and disastrously — insisted: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

A year later, Clinton delivered his State of the Union speech in the House chamber while his impeachment trial was underway in the Senate.

Clinton, however, kept his focus on the “longest peacetime economic expansion in our history” and on his plan to protect Social Security.

“The most capable White Houses leverage this moment to not just be a night of television where you have a big national audience, but to set both the message and policy agenda for the year,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who was a White House aide in the administrations of Clinton and President Barack Obama. “It should be an effective organizing tool for your whole administration. But I do not believe that this White House is capable of leveraging the State of the Union in that way, because there is no governing theory.”

White House aides, however, say the president will have plenty to say on policy.

Trump will try to find bipartisan support for the immigration framework he has laid out, which includes expanded protection and a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children in exchange for $25 billion for his border wall and more restrictions on legal immigration.

In the national security section of the speech, he is expected to address the ongoing nuclear threat from North Korea. Aides said he also plans to reiterate the international economic message he took to Davos: that the United States is open for business.

There will be touches that the national audience has come to expect in a State of the Union address. The White House has chosen a set of everyday Americans to sit with the first lady and have a moment in the spotlight as Trump tells their stories. Among them: someone who will be portrayed as a beneficiary of Republican economic policies, and someone who has been affected by the opioid crisis.

Even if the State of the Union address lives up to the White House’s billing, there remains the possibility that Trump will do what he has done in the past: step on his own message.

Just days after his carefully crafted address to the joint session last February, for example, Trump detonated a string of tweets accusing Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower, declaring, “This is McCarthyism!”

Instantly, that unsubstantiated charge overshadowed the speech.

“A year later, people have a skepticism about him in these moments,” said Michael Waldman, a chief speechwriter for Clinton and now president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “Everybody knows that teleprompter Trump can come close to sounding like a normal president, and Twitter Trump will upend that.”

Nonetheless, the White House has plans for Trump and his Cabinet to travel in the days after the speech to amplify and promote the agenda he lays out.

“This is the time when you’re master of your message and you’re in charge,” said Ken Khachigian, who was a top speechwriter in Ronald Reagan’s White House. “Take three or four or five days and bask in the glory.”

President Trump said he was ready to apologize for retweeting anti-Muslim videos from a far right British group and reiterated that he was not a racist, in an interview with Good Morning Britain on Friday.

Piers Morgan, the presenter, pushed him about the November retweet of three videos by Britain First that caused outrage in Britain and a rare rebuke by Prime Minister Theresa May.

Trump said he was unaware of the group’s politics and that the tweets showed his concern over the threat of radical Islam.

“If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that,” he said, according to a report on the interview by the British ITV broadcaster.

Morgan described the group, which presents itself as a political party but is widely seen as an extremist group targeting Muslims, as “racist.” Trump denied any knowledge of the group when he shared three videos from Jayda Francen, its deputy leader.

“Of course I didn’t know that. I know nothing about them and I know nothing about them today other than I read a little bit,” Trump said. “I don’t know who they are. I know nothing about them so I wouldn’t be doing that.”

He added that “I am often the least racist person that anybody is going to meet.”

After Trump retweeted the videos, Frayden expressed joy over the move, tweeting “God Bless You Trump!” and noting he had 44 million followers. She had been convicted of religiously aggravated harassment in November 2016 after abusing a woman wearing a hijab and was arrested a year later for a speech made in Belfast that used “threatening, abusive, insulting words.”

[Trump retweets inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos]

The videos showed alleged violent acts carried out by Muslims, including one of a boy on crutches being beat up by a Muslim migrant that was proved to be misleading.

A statement from the British prime minister’s office later called it “wrong” to share such materials that promote “hateful narratives.”

Morgan, the interviewer, himself weighed in on the controversy at the time, tweeting: “Good morning, Mr President @realDonaldTrump — what the hell are you doing retweeting a bunch of unverified videos by Britain First, a bunch of disgustingly racist far-right extremists? Please STOP this madness undo your retweets.”

The interview came while Trump was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he took the opportunity praise his relations with Britain and May.

“I can tell you I have a very good relationship with your prime minister,” Trump said, according to Reuters. “She’s been doing a very good job. We actually have a very good relationship, although a lot of people think we don’t.”

He added that the United States would come to the defense of Britain if needed.

Read more:

China casts a long shadow over Trump and Davos

Trump wins over global elites at Davos with $1.5 trillion tax cut

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President Trump sought the firing of Robert S. Mueller III last June, shortly after the special counsel took over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he backed off only after White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn threatened to resign over the move.

The extraordinary showdown was confirmed by two people familiar with the episode, which was first reported by the New York Times.

McGahn did not deliver his resignation threat directly to Trump but was serious about his threat to leave, according to a person familiar with the episode.

Trump denied the report Friday when asked about it during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Fake news, folks. Fake news,” Trump told reporters.

The president’s effort to fire the special counsel came in the weeks after Mueller’s appointment last May to lead the probe into whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russian attempts to tilt the election. Mueller was tapped for the role by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey.

The special counsel probe has quickly expanded to include an exploration of whether Trump has attempted to obstruct the ongoing investigation — a line of inquiry that could now include the president’s threats to fire Mueller himself.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment. McGahn did not respond to requests for comment.

A White House spokesman referred questions to Ty Cobb, the attorney coordinating the administration’s response to the Russia investigations, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment. John Dowd, an attorney for the president, declined to comment.

Democrats late Thursday renewed their calls for Congress to pass legislation to protect Mueller and future special counsels from being fired by the president. At least two such bills have been introduced in recent months by members of both parties.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation of Russian interference, said in a statement that “firing the Special Counsel is a red line that the President cannot cross. Any attempt to remove the Special Counsel, pardon key witnesses, or otherwise interfere in the investigation, would be a gross abuse of power, and all members of Congress, from both parties, have a responsibility to our Constitution and to our country to make that clear immediately.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former state attorney general, described Trump’s attempt to oust Mueller as “remarkable and stunning,” adding in an interview, “it shows the need immediately to protect the special counsel.”

Republican Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.) said in an interview that McGahn “prevented an Archibald Cox moment,” referring to the special prosecutor ordered fired by President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate investigation.

“I believe now that this revelation has been made public, that there will be increasing pressure to protect Mueller,” Dent added.

Trump was initially calm when Mueller was appointed, surprising White House aides, according to a senior administration official.

But in the weeks that followed, the president spoke with a number of friends and advisers who convinced him that Mueller would dig through his private finances and look beyond questions of collusion with Russians. They warned that the probe could last years and would ruin his first term in office.

At the time, Trump’s legal team was urging him to take an aggressive posture toward the special counsel and was compiling arguments about why Mueller could not be impartial. Among the points cited: an allegation that Mueller had gotten into a dispute over membership fees before he resigned from a Trump-owned golf course in Northern Virginia in 2011.

The dispute was hardly a dispute at all. According to a person familiar with the matter, Mueller had sent a letter requesting a dues refund in accordance with normal club practice and never heard back.

[Trump team seeks to control, block Mueller’s Russia investigation]

Trump’s ire at Mueller rose to such a level that then-White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus grew “incredibly concerned” that he was going to fire Mueller and sought to enlist others to intervene with the president, according to a Trump adviser who requested anonymity to describe private conversations.

Both of the men were deeply worried about the possibility and discussed how to keep him from making such a move, this person said.

Priebus and Bannon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In one meeting with other advisers, Bannon raised the concern that if Trump fired Mueller it could trigger a challenge to his presidency based on the 25th Amendment, which lays out the process of who succeeds a president in case of incapacitation.

Despite internal objections, Trump decided to assert that Mueller had unacceptable conflicts of interest and moved to remove him from his position, according to the people familiar with the discussions.

In response, McGahn said he would not remain at the White House if Trump went through with the move, according to a senior administration official.

The president, in turn, backed off.

Since then, Trump brought in a new legal team that has counseled cooperation with Mueller. He has continued to fume about the investigation, even as his lawyers have publicly pledged to work with the special counsel. On Thursday, Dowd released a memo outlining the administration’s commitment to transparency, noting that more than 20 White House officials have voluntarily given interviews.

But the revelation that Trump tried to fire Mueller could be a critical piece of evidence for the special counsel as he tries to build an obstruction case, said white-collar criminal defense attorney Jacob Frenkel, who previously worked in the Office of Independent Counsel.

“In the jigsaw puzzle of circumstantial evidence of criminal intent, these are more pieces that Mueller certainly would use,” Frenkel said. “You build it around the timing.”

The president’s attorneys will probably try to argue that Trump was merely responding to current events, without intending to impede anything, Frenkel added.

“The defense would be this was merely an emotional response that’s reflective of the frustration about the ongoing investigation and its distraction from the ability to govern,” he said.

Robert Costa, Ed O’Keefe, Philip Rucker, Sean Sullivan and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.