President Donald Trump has pushed out Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, raising concerns that the president could attempt to shut down the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Sessions was forced to resign Nov. 7 after enduring more than a year of blistering personal attacks from Trump over his recusal from the Russia investigation.
Sessions told the president in a one-page letter that he was submitting his resignation “at your request.”
The resignation was not a complete surprise.
The president has relentlessly attacked Sessions, even though he was the first U.S. senator to endorse him and despite the fact that the attorney general’s priorities including his hawkish immigration enforcement policies largely mirrored the president’s.
Sessions was not a good attorney general.
Sessions’ crime-fighting agenda marked a return to failed drug war tactics that unduly hurt minorities and the poor.
He was also too eager to do Trump’s bidding.
Sessions, for instance, fired one of the president’s primary antagonists, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, just before he was to have retired. Trump hailed the move as a “great day for democracy.”
Despite his acquiescence to Trump and hard-line conservative policies, Sessions never found himself back in favor with the president.
Trump publicly called Sessions weak and beleaguered. Leaked reports said Trump privately called the attorney general, a former senator from Alabama, “a dumb Southerner.”
Sessions acknowledged previously undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador and citing his work as a campaign aide, recused himself from the Russia investigation in March 2017.
Trump was furious over Sessions’ recusal and said that he would have never selected him if he had known the attorney general would recuse himself.
Trump wanted a loyalist and lackey as attorney general, not someone who would recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The recusal left the investigation in the hands of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel two months later after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey.
Trump waited to move against Sessions until after the midterm election and after Republican senators who had publicly backed Sessions had signaled a willingness to consider a new attorney general.
The Mueller investigation should examine whether Trump’s personal attack on Sessions and his forced resignation is part of a broader effort to obstruct justice and hamper or halt the probe.
Trump has consistently showed his blatant disregard for the Mueller investigation.
Trump announced in a tweet that he was naming Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney from Iowa, as acting attorney general.
Whitaker had mused publicly about how a Sessions replacement might reduce Mueller’s budget “so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” He wrote in a September 2017 column that Mueller had “come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing,” after CNN reported that the special counsel could be looking into Trump and his associates’ financial ties to Russia.
Lawmakers should demand that Whitaker recuse himself from any involvement in the Mueller probe.
Trump’s decision to move against Sessions and possible interference in the Russia investigation will test the resolve of Democrats and the reluctance of Republicans to challenge him.
In April, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve a bipartisan bill to protect Mueller from interference. In September, House Republicans stymied an effort by their Democratic counterparts to force a vote on legislation that would offer Mueller protection from Trump.
The legislation said that Mueller could be removed only “for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or other good cause, including violation of policies of the Department of Justice.”
Congress must take action to ensure that the Department of Justice safeguards the integrity of the Mueller investigation.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune.)
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