Trump fires Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Replaces him with open critic of Mueller probe, threatening investigation
WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump has fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with a public critic of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, significantly increasing the chances that Mueller will be fired or otherwise thwarted.
Trump forced Sessions’s resignation the day after the midterm congressional elections in which Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. He named Matthew Whitaker, a Republican lawyer who has called for Mueller to be ordered to narrow his work, as the acting attorney general.
Trump did not explain himself, but he had long fumed about Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia matter. Because of the recusal, Mueller was being supervised by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appeared to give the special counsel free rein.
With Sessions out of the picture, Mueller will likely now report to Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor and Republican political candidate who had served as Sessions’s chief of staff.
Democrats were generally opposed to Sessions. But they responded with alarm to Sessions’s ouster and to Whitaker’s appointment, worried Trump’s moves were the beginning of an effort to use his office to thwart or terminate Mueller.
“It’s clear that AG Sessions resignation is the first step toward removing the special counsel and burying his findings before Democrats take power next year. We can’t let that happen,” Rep. Ted Deutch, the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee, said on Twitter.
The American Civil Liberties Union said on Twitter: “Jeff Sessions was the worst attorney general in modern American history. Period. But the dismissal of the nation’s top law enforcement official shouldn’t be based on political motives.”
A month before he was hired as Sessions’s chief of staff last year, Whitaker wrote an article in which he argued that Mueller was on the verge of going too far, by delving into Trump’s finances, and that he should be ordered by Rosenstein to narrow his work.
He also mused on television about slashing Mueller’s budget to a level “so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt” — it was not clear if he endorsed the idea — and he defended Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 decision, being investigated by Mueller, to take a meeting with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton. On Twitter, he shared an article that urged Trump’s legal team not to co-operate with the “Mueller lynch mob.”
And Whitaker, who unsuccessfully ran in the Iowa Republican primary for Senate in 2014, served as chair for the 2014 Iowa treasurer campaign of Sam Clovis, who later became co-chair of the Trump 2016 campaign. Clovis has reportedly been a witness in the Mueller investigation.
“Given his previous comments advocating defunding and imposing limitations on the Mueller investigation, Mr. Whitaker should recuse himself from its oversight for the duration of his time as acting attorney general,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
Republican Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Chuck Grassley, also from Iowa, said in a statement that Whitaker would make the country proud. “The Justice Department is in good hands during this time of transition,” he said.
Whitaker can remain in his acting post for up to seven months. A permanent replacement for Sessions will have to be approved by the Senate.
Sessions, a once-fringe former Alabama senator and federal prosecutor, was the first sitting member of the Senate to endorse Trump. He used his job as head of the Department of Justice to turn their shared hard-line views on immigration and criminal justice into policy.
Sessions was widely seen as one of Trump’s most effective appointees. But Trump was fixated on the recusal decision, which allowed Rosenstein to appoint Mueller and start the investigation Trump calls a “witch hunt.”
Rosenstein had expressed hostility to the idea of firing Mueller. Now, Trump can theoretically have Whitaker do the firing for him — though a federal regulation says the attorney general needs a good cause: “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest,” or “other good cause, including violation of departmental policies.”
Firing Mueller would likely cause the biggest firestorm of Trump’s presidency, producing a democratic crisis that would increase the chances that Trump could eventually be impeached.
Whitaker could sharply limit Mueller without a firing. If he is indeed put in charge of the investigation, as planned, he will have authority over Mueller’s decisions on who to subpoena and who to charge with crimes, and he will decide what to do with any final report Mueller produces.
Trump had blasted Sessions in an unprecedented months-long series of angry tweets, public statements and private rants. In an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, he berated Sessions so forcefully over the recusal that Sessions wrote a letter of resignation, according to multiple news reports and former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus.
Trump, persuaded not to accept, settled for taunting Sessions on Twitter.
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are emails & DNC server) & Intel leakers!” he wrote in July. “I have never seen anything so Rigged in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff and Missing in Action,” he wrote in August of the Mueller investigation.
Sessions had made a major mark. An opponent of a bipartisan push toward the liberalization of justice policy, he reversed a series of Obama-era efforts that sought to reform policing and prosecution practices.
Sessions told prosecutors to seek the harshest possible sentences for drug offences, reversing the Obama-era guidance that favoured more leniency for nonviolent crimes.
He had the Justice Department pull back from their Obama-era push to compel rights-violating local police forces to change their practices. He rescinded an Obama-era directive that sought to reduce the use of private prisons. And he rescinded another Obama-era directive that told the federal government to take a hands-off approach to states that have legalized marijuana.