A Justice showdown, coming soon
Mark your calendar: The constitutional crisis begins in earnest come May. I know it’s hard to see clearly through the smoke pouring out of America’s great garbage fire, but if you squint you might catch a glimpse of Rudy Giuliani lighting a cigar in the Grand Havana Room atop Jared Kushner’s 666 5th Ave. and raising a glass to Jeff Sessions, the schnook who took the job as Donald Trump’s attorney general after America’s mayor turned it down.
And you might see the outline of the crisis emerging now that Sessions — desperately playing for time and trying to satisfy his madman boss — has thrown a huge log of pot directly onto the flames.
A quick recap of Justice’s bonkers new year so far:
l The New York Times reports that a Sessions aide went digging for dirt on thenFBI Director Jim Comey, aiming to get one ugly story a day out there about the man who reported to the attorney general and was leading the probe into Russian interference in our election until Trump fired him.
l Opened up still another new probe of Hillary Clinton’s email server, the Daily Beast reported — not after coming across some new evidence, but after the Donald’s latest tweets demanding “justice” for “Crooked Hillary” and her longtime aide Huma Abedin.
l Opened a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s activities while Hillary served as secretary of state, The Hill reported, in what appears to be a last-ditch effort to potentially bring the charges the President keeps demanding ahead of the expiration next month of the five-year statute of limitations on many of them.
l The guy who once joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot” broke his word to his fellow Republican senators and — days after California opened its recreational pot market — without warning reversed Justice Department policy so that U.S. attorneys are now free to pursue federal charges against state-sanctioned pot purveyors in the 30 states with recreational or medical markets. So much for the Southern gentleman’s belief in the conservative principle of “local control.”
That was all last week, when Sessions — conspicuously not invited to Trump’s meeting with his inner circle at Camp David this weekend — watched as Democrat Doug Jones was sworn in to his old Alabama Senate seat thanks to first Sloppy Steve Bannon and then Commander Donnie Carnage’s endorsements of teen-loving nut Roy Moore.
Oh, and Sessions finally got around to naming 17 interim U.S. attorneys to replace the acting ones who came in after Trump finally got around to firing Obama’s hires last March. Replacing Joon Kim, who admirably filled in for Preet Bharara in the Southern District, is Geoffrey Berman, who’d been a not particularly distinguished partner at Giuliani’s law firm and who now controls the office that has jurisdiction over much of Trump’s private empire. But perhaps not for long. Sessions named those interim U.S. attorneys just before the clock ran out on the 300 days the Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows the acting ones to remain in that capacity. Now, the interim ones can stay for just 120 days without Senate confirmation. Then federal judges would name U.S. attorneys, with Trump and Sessions cut out of the loop.
The White House has yet to even submit the names for Senate approval, though, and New York Sens. Chuck Schumer (Bharara’s old boss) and Kirsten Gillibrand have yet to indicate that they would back Berman. More, Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner — furious that Sessions flat-out lied to him about pot policy when he was the A.G. nominee, and gave no warning before reversing himself as A.G. — says he’ll hold up all Justice nominees until he gets a satisfactory answer about how this happened.
Meantime, Trump is going on about his “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department” and reserving his right to a future Saturday Night Massacre even as Trumpist House Republicans lay supporting fire by calling on Sessions to resign.
All of which suggests that this administration has learned nothing since its disastrous rollout of the original seven-country travel ban, written by non-lawyer Stephen Miller, was knocked over by multiple judges on the federal bench. That Trump is still just making it up as he goes, and then expressing fury when the legislature and the courts won’t bend to his sloppily executed executive will.
And that Sessions is running out of ways to satisfy his boss before senators tired of this at once imperial and inept White House let the “so-called judges” of the federal bench take control in May of key Justice appointments in what looks to be a bedrock fight over the rule of law. Stay tuned.