US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would never have hired Attorney General Jeff Sessions if he had known the top law official would recuse himself from a probe into Russia's alleged election meddling.

"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'm not going to take you,'" Trump said in an interview with The New York Times.

"It's extremely unfair -- and that's a mild word -- to the president."