Highway robbery, by the police
So Donald Trump, speaking for himself Wednesday, said “I would have picked somebody else” had he known Jeff Sessions would recuse himself from all things Russia. White House principal press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, speaking for Trump Thursday, said “clearly he has confidence in (Sessions) or he would not be the attorney general.”
Everyone around Trump ends up diminished.
Everything, really. Asked whom the attorney general serves, the President or the Constitution, Sanders replied, “Both.”
But Sessions may be, for now at least, the rare person Trump needs more than the other way around.
The early and steady support of the Alabama senator, never afraid to go his own way, was crucial to Trump’s stunning win. And the immigration and law-and-order true believers who Trump can’t afford to lose given his approval ratings in the toilet won’t just stand behind him if Sessions (who, it was reported, already offered to resign earlier this year) goes, particularly with little chance of getting another such hard-liner confirmed by the Senate to replace him.
Sessions, who gave up a safe Senate seat to join the administration, sees his job as the nation’s top lawman as a reward for his loyalty and as his ultimate vindication for the Senate's 1986 vote to reject him for a federal judgeship because of his retrograde views (like maybe agreeing that a white civil rights lawyer was “a disgrace to his race” and calling the ACLU “Communist-inspired” and “un-American”).
So Trump, who’s struggled mightily to get stuff done as President and who just wants to make Trump’s numbers great again, is stuck with Sessions, who really means this MAGA business and who’s done plenty as AG to dismantle Obamaera reforms and unleash that “greatness.”
Harsher drug policies, including for pot. An end to most Justice Department oversight of local police forces.
And now a policy shift to fully revive “civil asset forfeiture,” the anodyne term for the program that lets local cops work with the feds to seize property and money from people suspected of a crime — a top priority of the police unions that supported Trump as forces rake in cash to pay for weapons, gear and vehicles.
Sessions said he’s doing this “to send a clear message that crime does not pay.”
It can for police departments, though. This is a proven recipe for corruption — quite literally highway robbery.
The way it works is that cops can stop you for about anything, and then take your stuff if they suspect you of a crime — no need to convict or even charge you first.
A few people then spend significant time and money legally challenging the federal government to try and get their money and assets back (and those who do often have to sign away their right to sue local departments in exchange) while many more just eat the loss as the feds keep 20% and the cops pocket the rest. The states, more than 20 of which have laws banning civil forfeitures, are cut out of the loop.
Back in 2014, the Washington Post found that since 9/11, cops had seized 2.5 billion supposedly crime-related dollars, most of it in chunks of under $10,000, from people who were never charged with a crime.
If this sounds like something out of “1984,” maybe it’s because civil seizures were part of The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. While that law prohibits using seizures cash on salaries, hundreds of departments and task forces seized the equivalent of 20% or more of their budgets — quite an incentive to “suspect” crimes.
A Justice Inspector General report earlier this year — considering the program after Obama Attorney General Eric Holder introduced some modest reforms two years ago, which Sessions has now undone — found that “cash seizures . . . may not advance or relate to criminal investigations, and may pose risks to civil liberties.”
Most, it said, are based only on “the observations and immediate judgment of DEA agents” or local cops “without preexisting intelligence of a specific drug crime” — with the DEA unable to connect 44% of seizures to a criminal investigation.
The report concludes: “Law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution.”
Policing for profit is, almost inevitably, bad. That, not “hands up, don’t shoot” was the real and original sin in Ferguson, as detailed by the Justice Department as it used the sort of review Sessions has condemned to push through badly overdue reforms.
As Sessions and Trump appear to be stuck with each other, more Fergusons are looming on the horizon.