Daily Freeman (Kingston, NY)

Sessions actually is helping Trump

- Michael Reagan Making Sense Michael Reagan is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Along with his many other daily Tweet targets, President Trump can’t stop beating up on Jeff Sessions for being a lousy attorney general.

When it comes to Sessions, the president leaves no petty pebble un-thrown.

This week, Trump supposedly was heard telling his aides that he didn’t like Sessions’ Alabama accent or the fact that he didn’t go to an Ivy League school like the president did.

Trump isn’t the only Republican who’s unhappy with Sessions, who obviously should have told the president before he was hired that he was planning to recuse himself from the Russian collusion investigat­ion.

Trump supporters and the conservati­ve media have been clamoring for the president to force Sessions to resign since day one.

They want the president to hire a new attorney general who’ll rein in special counselor Robert Mueller or, better yet, they say, fire him.

They want someone who’ll name a special counsel to aggressive­ly prosecute Hillary Clinton for destroying her emails, or to fully investigat­e the political corruption we’ve learned thrived at the top of the Obama administra­tion’s FBI and intelligen­ce agencies.

Any other cabinet member who had been criticized and demeaned so many times in public by his president would have cleared out his desk and left a year ago.

So why hasn’t Sessions resigned?

I think it’s because he is a lot smarter than people — and maybe even the president — think he is.

I think he knows that by staying at his attorney general’s job, he is actually helping Trump politicall­y.

Sessions, who as a senator was one of Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters, knows that as soon as he’s gone, his boss will appoint a new attorney general whose litmus test would be to promise to fire Mueller.

Whether Mueller deserves to be fired is not the issue.

Neither is the fact that Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Clinton or hack the Democrat National Committee’s computers.

But the second Sessions is canned or resigns, the president will be accused of obstructin­g justice by everyone on the planet except Vladimir Putin.

Democrats, Republican­s and the mainstream media will be united against him.

It wouldn’t matter how innocent Trump is of colluding. It would look like he was trying to obstruct justice.

He’d be severely hurt politicall­y — as would the Republican Party in the midterm elections this fall.

Sessions has to know all of this.

I think he knows that by not resigning until the Mueller investigat­ion is over, he’s protecting the president from himself and from doing major political harm to the GOP.

Despite suffering 18 months of verbal abuse from his tough boss, Sessions just could still be one of Trump’s best friends.

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