WASHINGTON — President Trump called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday to end the special counsel investigation, an extraordinary appeal to the nation’s top law enforcement official to end an inquiry directly into the president.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers quickly elaborated on the president’s message, saying it was not an order to a member of his cabinet, but merely an opinion.
Presidents typically do not weigh in on ongoing Justice Department investigations, but Mr. Trump has been outspoken about his anger and frustration with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to Trump associates. Mr. Trump has also said that he never would have made Mr. Sessions his attorney general if he had known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia inquiry.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Mr. Sessions recused himself in early 2017 from overseeing the Russia inquiry in part to avoid the kind of conflicts like what Mr. Trump proposed. Later, a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed to carry out the inquiry.
The president’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jay A. Sekulow, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Trump was not ordering the inquiry closed but simply expressing his opinion.
“It’s not a call to action,” Mr. Giuliani said, adding that it was a sentiment that Mr. Trump and his lawyers have expressed publicly before.
Mr. Sekulow said: “He doesn’t feel that he has to intervene in the process, nor is he intervening.”
His lawyers said the president wanted the legal process to play out. “He’s expressing his opinion, but he’s not talking of his special powers he has” as president, Mr. Giuliani said.
Mr. Trump’s blunt direction to Mr. Sessions came on the second day of the trial of Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman and the first person charged in the special counsel investigation to go to trial. Mr. Manafort is accused of bank and tax crimes.
Asking Mr. Sessions to end the inquiry was unprecedented and amounted to Mr. Trump asking Mr. Sessions to “subvert the law,” said Matthew S. Axelrod, a longtime prosecutor who served in top roles in the Obama Justice Department.
“What he’s saying here is that there’s no one who ought to be able to investigate his actions and, if necessary, hold him accountable for those actions,” Mr. Axelrod said, referring to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Axelrod said this request of Mr. Sessions was part of a larger pattern — one in which Mr. Trump attacked the integrity of the special counsel, Mr. Mueller, attacked the press and attacked the courts, “all institutions designed to provide checks on executive authority and executive overreach,” he said.
Mr. Trump gave the directive in a series of Twitter posts hitting familiar notes in his objections to the investigation and accusing an investigator of being “out to STOP THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP.” Some of his messages contained quotations the president attributed to a staunch supporter, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Mr. Trump also tweeted on Wednesday that Mr. Manafort did not work for his campaign long, a defense he has used repeatedly to distance himself from his former campaign chairman.
The special counsel is also looking into some of Mr. Trump’s tweets about Mr. Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and whether the messages were intended to obstruct the inquiry.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, suggested on Wednesday on Twitter that the president’s latest directive to Mr. Sessions was just that.
Katie Benner contributed reporting.