Is Sessions on the way out?
Top Senate Republicans sent dueling signals on Thursday about whether it would be safe for President Donald Trump to fire the attorney general he can’t stand…
The back-and-forth on the Hill came just as Sessions took the rare step of defending himself and his leadership of the Justice Department after a withering attack from Trump in an interview with Fox News that aired early Thursday over Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe now overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller: “Even my enemies say that ‘Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn’t have put him in.’ He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’
Sessions’ behavior regarding the investigations into Trump has long been puzzling, and it has angered a great many people on the right. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but I’ll hazard a guess, which is that Sessions was appointed for two reasons. The first was as a sort of thank-you for being one of Trump’s earliest supporters, and one of the few early supporters who was already a respected figure in the GOP. The second is that Sessions’ field of expertise was immigration and that’s what he expected to focus on. I don’t think he saw all this brouhaha (and certainly not the tangled mess of it) coming, and I don’t think he has the stomach for it, and so he took the first opportunity to recuse himself.
Sessions has said the following:
While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.
Nice sentiments. But I don’t think it’s possible in the current climate, and I think Sessions might be hopelessly naive about what’s going on. He wants to retreat to an ivory tower and not be in the messy position in which he finds himself.
And it might get a lot messier before it gets neater.
Doesn’t Sessions hold his job at the pleasure of Trump, the Chief Executive?
Doesn’t Trump have the right to tell Sessions what the priorities of the Justice Department–last time I looked, an Executive Agency–should be?
Shouldn’t Trump, as the Chief Executive, expect that his orders will be carried out by Sessions?
The excuse for Sessions inaction, that Trump and Sessions are, in reality, playing a good cop-bad cop routine, and that someday soon, Sessions will run all of the partisan hacks and crooks we’ve found at DOJ and the FBI out of these agencies and prosecute them for their crimes just won’t wash, neither will the idea that, despite what we see, Sessions is actually working feverishly, behind the scenes, to build a solid case against all these the hacks and crooks.
If such a general house cleaning and round of prosecutions has not happened by now, it’s never going to happen.
Sessions obviously needs to go but, as Sen. Lindsay Gram recently opined, Trump is probably waiting until the results of the November election are in, and he will likely have a more friendly Senate, which will allow Trump to get whoever he wants much more easily confirmed by the Senate as the new AG.
It’s hard to know if Sessions meant that literally, or if it was uttered with a stagey wink. It reminds me of Jonathan Turley, whose commentary on this whole mess proceeds with the assumption that all actors in the legal system are acting in good faith and the only problem is these pesky politicians tossing spitballs at them. That’s either naive or dishonest and we know bloody well that the previous administration made use of the Justice Department and the IRS as political tools and that career employees therein were happy to be so used. Restoring professionalism to the Department of Justice is going to require a great many dismissals. Ideally, the Department of Justice would be dissolved and its components parceled out among several departments and the FBI would face the same fate. Another thing we need to do is scarify the federal criminal code and re-calibrate statutory sentencing.
A serious problem is that Sessions’ resignation would leave Rosenstein in charge. There is no way that Trump could get a nominee through conformation before the mid-terms.
Very interesting article by Roger Kimball at American Greatness:
https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/crime-and-punishment-2/
In short, Kimball says Trump should declare that Mueller’s whole thing is political, aimed at Trump’s impeachment, but that Mueller is destroying the lives of Trump’s associates to get at him. In the process, Mueller is eviscerating the rule of law.
So, Trump could simply say “Bring it.” Trump can announce he will pardon everyone Mueller goes after, and tell Mueller to come after him instead.
I was a big fan of Sessions before he joined the administration.
Re: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.”
That comment is either a blatantly hypocritical lie or willful blindness so severe as to qualify for the grossest incompetence.
In either case, the man has to go. Waiting until after the midterms is clearly the smart move on Trump’s part.
What an utter disappointment Sessions has been as our A.G.
Be nice! Wait till after the midterms, give Sessions an ambassadorship, appoint Trey Goudy as Attorney General, and Alan Dershowitz to head a special commission to investigate the whole Brennan-Comey-Strozck-Page-Ohr-Mueller conspiracy.
We’ll see.
Way back when, Glen Reynolds commented that Sessions wasn’t the Attorney General Trump needed. I’ve tried to give Sessions the benefit of the doubt, but I can no longer support that optimistic view. Trump needs a wartime consigliere and Sessions isn’t it. Too bad. This whole mess could have been avoided if Sessions were street smart and had a clue. Nice man, wrong man for the position.
If such a general house cleaning and round of prosecutions has not happened by now, it’s never going to happen.
The media is not allowing you to pay attention to the pedo arrests.
As for Sessions not knowing this would happen… even I knew this would happen although the methods I predicted were more Final than dramatic.
Perhaps if Americans ever decide to elect the best of humanity rather than the worst of humanity to the great capital of evil, District of Columbia, things would change. Change is not something talked about.
I have been of the general opinion that Sessions and Trump were playing some kind of game – good cop, bad cop, or my favourite that Sessions was playing possum to let the lawfare types hang themselves. But yeah, I can’t see it anymore. There he was like Horatio at the bridge, right there as AG with a gang of lawyers, Gmen and spooks hell bent on a coup d’etat and he turns into Sergeant Schultz. It is time for Trump to bring Niccolò Machiavelli out of retirement and appoint him AG.
What is so puzzling? Trump wants Sessions to protect him from prosecutors uncovering his criminal acts.He said as much:
Now we all know Trump believes, or says he believes, that Obama did awful illegal things. Perhaps many of you here believe that too.
I’m not here to question that belief. I’m only here to point out that Trump wants an AG who will protect a President who commits criminal acts.
That’s the plain meaning of his words. His “I’ll be honest” quip tells us that he’s fully aware that what he’s saying is damning.
But apparently that’s a bridge too far for Sessions.
“the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”
Failure to turn over documents by the FBI & DOJ to Congress are clearly political considerations.
The FISA application rubber stamp was likely impeachable offense by the judges (R), as well as firing by the DOJ & FBI (Comey gone, Rosenstein signed off and is terrible).
Sessions probably can’t be fired before the midterms, tho it looks like there will be a breakup. Maybe he’ll just leave?
Don’t you feel a bit sorry for Trump? I do, I hate injustice and double standards. Which the Dems are showing.
Which might be part of The Donald’s plan, or might be luck for him — if I were the Reps, I’d sure be emphasizing the unprosecuted wrongs of the Dems vs. the non-Russian indictments of Trump associates (who were slimy and likely guilty, but only prosecuted because of Trump.)
Sessionszzz’ statement is nonsensical because he’s not investigating Hillary as far as anyone can tell. I mean, there are rumors that she’s still being investigated (Huber in UT), but nobody’s seen a shred of evidence that it’s real.
This, despite the facts that her exoneration was rigged and that the personnel in charge of her previous “investigation” were crooked as hell.
This SHOULD call into question all their work, but has anyone heard Sessionszzz say he’s reopening the email case? How about the new revelation that Strzok only looked at 3000 handpicked emails out of tens of thousands? Shouldn’t that have justified the case being reopened?
From a different angle, you can also say that if the AG has lost the confidence of the president then that’s all the justification you need to fire him. Furthermore, if Sessionszzz has recused himself from all matters Russian, then his firing can’t affect the Russian investigation. Lastly, the appointment of a replacement whom everyone agrees is impartial cannot be automatic interference in the Russian investigation if he shuts it down. Either the investigation can stand on its own merits or it cannot.
I believe the GOP establishment wants to keep Sessionszzz in office to ensure that justice is never done; that nobody who is guilty is ever convicted, because D.C. is an interlocking web of corruption: as soon as a few underlings start being prosecuted, they’ll roll over on the higher up and the whole rotten edifice will collapse.
I assume the GOPe is actually guilty of something pretty bad, and they don’t want to be exposed. I think that’s how they worked on Sessions: by appealing to his wrong-headed sense of patriotism.
Sessionszzz must go.
Here’s something I hope someone is investigating.
It seems to have dropped off the media radar, even on the Right.
Personally, I think the Campaign Finance Laws are a farce, because they are so easily misused legally, and violations are never prosecuted unless you are a Republican.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/24/bombshell-fec-records-indicate-hillary-campaign-illegally-laundered-84-million/
“FEC records, however, show several large contributions reported as received by the HVF and the same amount on the same day (or occasionally the following day) recorded as received by the DNC from a state Democratic committee, but without the state Democratic committee ever reporting the contribution.
For instance, the HVF reported transferring $19,500 to the Mississippi Democratic Party on November 2, 2015, and the Democratic National Committee reported receiving $19,500 from the Mississippi Democratic Party on November 2, 2015. But the Mississippi Democratic Party never recorded the receipt or the disbursement of the $19,500, and without the Mississippi Democratic Party controlling the funds, the HVF’s contribution to the DNC violated campaign finance law.
Over a 13-month period, FEC records show some 30 separate occasions when the HVF transferred contributions totaling more than $10 million to the DNC without any corresponding record of the receipt or disbursement from the state parties, thus illegally leap-frogging the state Democratic parties.
On the other hand, of the contributions state parties reported as received from the HVF, 99 percent wound up at the DNC. They were transferred immediately or within a day or two, raising questions of whether the state Democratic committees truly exercised control over the money—something necessary under campaign finance law to allow a later-legal transfer to the DNC.”