President Trump said Wednesday he never would have nominated Jeff Sessions to be attorney general if he had known Sessions was going to recuse himself from a Justice Department investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Trump associates. The president made the remarks during a wide-ranging interview in the Oval Office with The New York Times.

President Donald Trump: “Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have—which—which, frankly, I think, is 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 extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”

President Trump also left open the possibility that he could order the Justice Department to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who’s been assigned to investigate Russia’s role in the 2016 election. This is Trump being questioned in the Oval Office by New York Times reporters.

Michael Schmidt: “If Mueller goes looking at your finances or your family’s finances unrelated to Russia, is that a red line?”

Maggie Haberman: “Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?”

President Donald Trump: “I would say yeah. Yeah, I would say yes.”

President Trump also characterized a second, previously undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Germany earlier this month as a discussion about “pleasantries” that lasted just 15 minutes. That contradicts reports that the two spoke for roughly an hour.