Making the case for Sessions
President throwing his ally under the bus
Why oh why would Donald Trump go after Jeff Sessions?
With all the rotten, nasty, slimy creatures slithering around the D.C. swamp, why would the president go after the most loyal of his supporters, the first guy in Congress to endorse him, a thoroughly decent, God-fearing, honest Republican?
What about Chuck Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Luis Gutierrez? Maxine Waters?
They’re all getting a free ride right now while Sessions is taking one 140-character blast after another. Trump is “very disappointed,” he tweeted yesterday. Sessions has a “very weak position” on Hillary Clinton’s crimes. (Like the president himself hasn’t flip-flopped on whether or not to prosecute her).
What is the president thinking of? Last night in Youngstown, Trump was bragging about the plummeting numbers of illegal immigrants invading the country since Jan. 20, which is great. But, you know, does he ever consider that maybe Jeff Sessions has had something to do with this great success in beginning to put an end to the illegals’ crime wave?
“We’re liberating our towns,” Trump thundered, “and we’re liberating our cities.”
Shortly before Trump took his bows, AP Politics tweeted this out: “BREAKING: Justice Department imposes new grant rules requiring ‘sanctuary cities’ to give feds access to jails, notice on releases.” Thank you, Jeff Sessions. Did you notice how many of Trump’s biggest applause lines last night were about immigration? Who was the hard-liner in the Senate on illegal immigration? Who wrote these words to Congressional Republicans in 2015?
“‘Immigration reform’ may be the single most abused phrase in the English language. It has become a legislative honorific almost exclusively reserved for proposals which benefit everyone but actual American citizens.”
The fact that Sessions endorsed Trump drove home the message to GOP primary voters that Trump was serious about halting illegal immigration. But yesterday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal Sessions endorsed him because he saw the big crowds Trump was drawing.
I know, Trump is frustrated that Sessions recused himself from the phony Russian “investigation.” He brought in Rod Rosenstein as his deputy, who brought in Robert Mueller (who went to prep school with John Kerry), who brought in all those Hillary contributors. … It’s a mess, no doubt about it.
I get it, Trump wanted Sessions to thumb his nose at everybody, the way Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder did.
But Sessions has to play by the rules. He has to play the hand he was dealt, and as a conservative Republican, he was looking at a bunch of twos and threes.
A lot of people in DOJ and the FBI need to be pinkslipped — yesterday. But Jeff Sessions isn’t one of them.
First major politician to endorse Donald Trump, and now he’s getting thrown under the bus like he’s Jeb Bush or something. No good deed goes unpunished.
President Trump’s ritual humiliation of a member of his own Cabinet continued yesterday, on a day the White House could have been command central for the health care debate (see below). Instead it was the center of a three-ring political circus.
Trump’s selection of a new communications chief has done nothing to rein him in; in fact, it seems to have emboldened him.
The president previously had asserted that “so many people” are wondering why Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t knee-deep in a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton (the need for which Trump himself had dismissed after the election). Surely among those “wondering” are authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Maduro, who believe the tools of elected office are most useful in the pursuit of political opponents.
That was just the first in a series of mocking tweets, in which the president insisted Sessions should be investigating Clinton’s “crimes,” calling him “weak” and “beleaguered.” Last week he told The New York Times he would never have appointed Sessions had he known the AG would recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, and repeated that statement in the Rose Garden yesterday. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal he waved off Sessions’ early support of his campaign, suggesting he had only supported Trump because it helped him in his home state of Alabama.
It has been an utterly breathtaking display — either calculated to get Sessions to quit, or laying the groundwork for his firing (about the AG’s fate, yesterday Trump would only say “time will tell”).
But if he was looking for validation from Republicans in Congress he wasn’t finding much.
“Jeff Sessions is one of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my political life,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said. “(Sessions) is a rock-solid conservative, but above all else he believes in the rule of law. He understands we are a nation of laws, not men.”
Sessions could quit, to preserve his dignity in the face of this humiliating onslaught (and few would blame him). But if the president wants Sessions gone he should be forced to fire him, then deal with the fallout of a move that — whatever his cover story — would be about one thing only, and that is quashing the Russia investigation. And good luck to the president in finding another qualified AG willing to volunteer as tribute.