Forget Russia. Fire Sessions over forfeiture.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to steal from you.

He doesn’t call it that. He calls it “civil forfeiture.” But what it is, is theft by law enforcement.

Sessions should be ashamed. If I were president, he would be fired.

Under “civil forfeiture,” police can take property from people under the legal fiction that the property itself is guilty of a crime. (“Legal fiction” sounds better than “lie,” but in this case the two terms are near synonyms.) It was originally sold as a tool for going after the assets of drug kingpins, but nowadays it seems to be used against a lot of ordinary Americans, who just have things that law enforcement wants.

It’s also a way for law enforcement agencies to maintain offbudget slush funds, thus escaping scrutiny.

“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” Drug Enforcement Agency agent Sean Waite told the Albuquerque Jour

nal. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.” Presumed to be guilty. Once in America, we had a presumption of innocence. But that was inconvenient to the powers that be. The problem is pretty widespread: In 2015, The Wash

ington Post reported that law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did.

And it’s not only a species of theft; it’s a species of corruption.

Starting in 1984, police were allowed to retain the assets they seized instead of paying them into the general treasury. Not surprisingly, this has led to abuses in which law enforcement tar- get individuals based on how much money they can get and how easily they can get it, not on people’s status as criminals.

What’s more, by retaining these assets, law enforcement agencies have money to do things that the legislatures haven’t chosen to fund. That undermines democracy.

As deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., put it, according to

The Post: “All of our hometowns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine.”

In one case, law enforcement seized a student’s luggage and money because the bags smelled like marijuana.

In another, officers seized a man’s life savings because the series of deposits from his convenience store looked to them like he was laundering money.

Of course, it’s especially easy to be suspicious of people when those suspicions let you transfer their bank accounts into yours.

Some states have required that people be convicted of a crime before the government can seize their assets, but the feds have no such requirement. Congress should enact one.

In the meantime, Sessions is doing exactly the wrong thing by doubling down on asset seizure. The message it sends is that the feds see the rest of us as prey, not as citizens.

The attorney general should be ashamed to take that position. And, really, he should just be gone.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.