Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
For crusading AG, boss’ digs just a ‘cross’
WASHINGTON — Even as President Donald Trump has raged at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, calling his actions “disgraceful” this week, Sessions arguably has done more to deliver on Trump’s hard-right agenda than any other member of the Cabinet.
From immigration enforcement to battling sanctuary cities, from opposing marijuana legalization to stopping what Trump labeled “carnage in America” in his inaugural speech, Sessions has proved a stalwart ally, if only because the issues were already part of his own conservative political agenda.
After months of silently enduring Trump’s taunts and tweets — the president mockd the attorney general as “very weak” and “beleaguered,” and all but invited him to quit — Sessions raised eyebrows this week when he publicly pushed back for the first time.
In a Justice Department statement Wednesday, Sessions suggested the president had gone too far by questioning his decision to refer an internal dispute over a surveillance warrant to the department’s inspector general, as regulations require, rather than to its prosecutors, as Trump had demanded earlier that day on Twitter
“As long as I am the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution,” he wrote.
Trump has made no secret of his anger ever since Sessions stepped aside last March from supervising the Russia investigation that has cast a dark cloud over the White House, a decision that Trump apparently viewed as a betrayal of Sessions’ loyalty to him.
Despite Sessions’ hardright bona fides — he was considered one of the most conservative members of the U.S. Senate during his four terms in office — other conservatives have piled on.
But Sessions has shown no sign he’s about to give in.
Friends and associates say he is willing to endure the abuse to stand up for the Justice Department and the rule of law, and continue his mission of remaking its policies to fit his deeply conservative, tough-oncrime philosophy.
“He’s decided he’s not going to be run out by the president,” said Armand DeKeyser, Sessions’ former chief of staff in the Senate. “He knows the bullets are flying all around him, and at him — most of the time at him. Nothing has been a mortal wound so far. I think he’ll keep fighting the good fight and keep doing the best he can to protect the Justice Department.”
Sessions spent six years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Alabama before President Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1981 to be U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, a job he held for 12 years.
Over that time, Sessions developed a strong affection for the Justice Department and its traditions, friends and associates say.
Sessions was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump’s presidential campaign, and he did so when most of his Senate colleagues and the GOP were openly disdainful. As a key adviser, Sessions strongly supported the harsh anti-immigration message that helped propel Trump to the White House.
“Immigration is (Trump’s) thing, it’s what he sees as most important — and Sessions is one of the people who is making that happen,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that pushes for lower immigration, both legal and illegal.
As a senator, Sessions was a fierce fighter for the anti-immigration cause, playing a key role in the defeat of two major reform bills, including an ambitious effort in 2013 that had bipartisan support.
“In a sense, the president’s attacks on him are the cross he has to bear in order to bring about the changes he thinks are necessary,” said Krikorian, who grades Sessions an “A-plus” on immigration issues important to his group.
Though the Department of Homeland Security handles immigration enforcement, Sessions has utilized nearly every tool available at the Justice Department to support the crackdown under the Trump.
He has added 50 immigration judges to reduce a backlog that has clogged courts and delayed deportations. He has applied pressure on so-called sanctuary states and cities that don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement.
And he has provided Trump with the legal opinion to support the president’s decision to end the Obama-era program that deferred deportations for more than 700,000 socalled Dreamers, undocumented migrants who came to the U.S. as children.
When Trump decided to rescind the program, it was Sessions who announced it.
He has moved to support the controversial practice of civil forfeiture, when law enforcement seizes property used in crimes.
With an antipathy to drugs dating to his experience as a prosecutor in the 1970s, Sessions also canceled an Obama administration policy that provided harbor for states that legalized recreational marijuana.
In what could prove one of his most consequential changes, he told federal prosecutors to once again file the toughest charges possible against defendants in drug cases, scrapping an Obama-era policy by former Attorney General Eric Holder that encouraged more discretion against low-level offenders.
He also has worked to scuttle a proposed bipartisan sentencing reform bill in the Senate, drawing an angry rebuke from his former colleague, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, head of the Judiciary Committee.
In a speech in San Diego on Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spoke up for Sessions and the department’s “ethics and professionalism.”
“History will reflect that the Department of Justice operated with integrity on our watch,” Rosenstein said.