• President Donald Trump once called Attorney General Jeff Sessions a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent behind his back, the journalist Bob Woodward wrote in his coming book, a copy of which was reviewed by The Washington Post.
  • Trump also called Sessions “mentally retarded” and described him as a “traitor” for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, the book says, according to The Post.
  • Trump has frequently been said to insult his attorney general.

President Donald Trump once called Attorney General Jeff Sessions a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent behind his back, the journalist Bob Woodward wrote in his coming book, a copy of which was reviewed by The Washington Post.

Trump also described Sessions as a “traitor” for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, the book says, according to The Post.

Woodward also reportedly wrote that Trump, mimicking Sessions’ Southern accent, called his attorney general “mentally retarded” and said that Sessions “couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

The revelations in Woodward’s book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” set to be released next Tuesday, represent the latest episode in a public feud between Trump and Sessions since the attorney general’s recusal in March 2017.

In an interview with Fox News in August, Trump said that the reason he tapped Sessions to be his attorney general was Sessions' loyalty during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump also suggested that Democrats had more power and influence within the Justice Department than Sessions.

Sessions responded with a rare rebuke of Trump, saying, "The actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations."

On Monday, Trump accused Sessions of jeopardizing Republicans' chances in the midterm elections by bringing charges against two GOP congressmen in August.

Though Sessions was one of the earliest backers of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump is said to still want to fire him as attorney general.

The White House responded to Woodward's book later Tuesday.

"This book is nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the president look bad," the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement.

And the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, decried the book as "another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration's many successes."