Immediately following the meeting with the President, Lewandowski saw Dearborn in the anteroom outside the Oval Office and gave him a typewritten 625 version of the message the President had dictated to be delivered to Sessions. Lewandowski told Dearborn that the notes were the message they had discussed, but Dearborn did not recall whether Lewandowski said the message was from 626 the President. The message “definitely raised an eyebrow” for Dearborn, and he recalled not wanting to ask where it came from or think further about doing 627 anything with it. Dearborn also said that being asked to serve as a messenger 628 to Sessions made him uncomfortable. He recalled later telling Lewandowski that he had handled the situation, but he did not actually follow through with delivering the message to Sessions, and he did not keep a copy of the typewritten 629 notes Lewandowski had given him. 3. The President Publicly Criticizes Sessions in a New York Times Interview Within hours of the President’s meeting with Lewandowski on July 19, 2017, the President gave an unplanned interview to the New York Times in which he criticized Sessions’s decision to recuse from the Russia 630 investigation. The President said that “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he 631 took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” Sessions’s recusal, the President said, was “very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.’ It’s 632 extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.” Hicks, who was present for the interview, recalled trying to “throw [herself] between the reporters and [the President]” to stop parts of the interview, but the President 633 “loved the interview.” Later that day, Lewandowski met with Hicks and they discussed the 634 President’s New York Times interview. Lewandowski recalled telling Hicks about the President’s request that he meet with Sessions and joking with her about the idea of firing Sessions as a private citizen if Sessions would not meet 635 with him. As Hicks remembered the conversation, Lewandowski told her the President had recently asked him to meet with Sessions and deliver a message