Stay Sessions
The attorney general should remain until completion of the Russia investigation.
If a boss sitting in the corner office of a glittering downtown skyscraper spent time on social media trying to bully a high-profile employee into quitting, you can bet that a horde of board-certified labor law attorneys would line up around the block to investigate the case. Or at the very least, the C-suite would receive a sit-down with the HR director.
Potential legal ramifications aside, a good boss knows that you don’t try to pressure an employee to leave through email or social media.
“Doing so is cowardly and guaranteed to make the situation worse,” Bob Rosner and Allan Halcrow write in The Boss’s Survival Guide, a go-to primer for executives. “Meet with the employee. Respect the employee in the process.”
You can guess that Donald Trump probably never read that book as head of the Trump Organization. He’s spent the past week attacking Attorney General Jeff Sessions and publicly lamenting that the former Alabama senator had ever been hired in the first place.
When you’re the president, it isn’t just about respecting your employees. The way the chief executive treats his staff reflects his respect for our system of government and rule of law.
Sessions stood up for our republic when he recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. He was a key member of that campaign, and his presence could undermine the perception of a fair process.
Trump, however, sees a higher value at play — loyalty. And now he’s frustrated that Sessions refuses to simply shut down the whole investigation.
It is hardly a just reward for the first senator to don the “Make America Great Again” cap — not that Trump seems to care.
“It’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement,” Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, referencing Sessions’ early backing of his presidential campaign.
Loyalty might as well be the unofficial slogan for this administration. Family members like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner fill the White House. Former FBI Director James Comey was fired after he declined to swear loyalty to the president — and refused to scuttle the Russia investigation.
The issue was even raised during the president’s speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia on Monday.
“As the scout law says, a scout is trustworthy, loyal,” Trump said. “We could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.”
But for Trump, loyalty is a one-way street. Take Sean Spicer, the muchmaligned acting White House communications director who lied about crowd sizes, changed suits and endured public mockery at his boss’s command. Trump replaced him within six months. And apparently the attorney general is next on his list.
Trump’s friends and backers would be wise to remind him that his appointees don’t swear loyalty to the president — they swear to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution. Sessions’ resignation, or his firing, would trigger a political crisis more dire than Watergate. The president simply cannot be allowed to shut down investigations that threaten to implicate him or his family. Richard Nixon tried that during the Saturday Night Massacre. He was then forced from office for obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
The Russia investigation has to proceed without presidential interference. Trump can’t tweet his way out of this one. Even the president has bosses — the American people and rule of law.