Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach

Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach

Imagehttps://static01.nyt.com/images/2018...isable=upscale
Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York TimesBy Katie Benner

• Oct. 19, 2018
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WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.

Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

President Trump has exacerbated the dynamic, they said, by repeatedly attacking Mr. Sessions and the Justice Department in baldly political and personal terms. And he has castigated rank-and-file employees, which career lawyers said further chilled dissent and debate within the department.

The people interviewed — many years long department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.

“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.

A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.

“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.

Driven by Ideology

Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/u...epartment.html

Sounds like a lot of the career lawyers in the DOJ are unhappy about Sessions policy changes on immigration.

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Originally Posted by MW

Sounds like a lot of the career lawyers in the DOJ are unhappy about Sessions policy changes on immigration.

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Right. The feds, as well as liberal states like mine, simply have a culture that has gone along with left wing movements, and has to move out of its comfort zone when conservatives take over. Seen that profoundly in my state.

Yesterday when I woke up, I found my radio was tuned to the "alternative, listener-supported" radio station just below the PBS station. In this state one of our Dem. Senators had worked with a "Gray Panthers" group of retirees early in his career. And this station said they were still having meetings at the state university downtown. I called in an talked to the guy----and told him I would be in favor of Social Security increases for the lower rungs of SS recipients....but I now realize that people like government employees have carved out some really luxurious retirements whereby after paying them for safe jobs ( I am not belittling their skills) we also have to fund some over the top pensions. The public employees retirement systems are probably the biggest single burden we taxpayers are dealing with now.

I also found that in our union it is tremendously far from "equal." Union officials get a double retirement pension, and would be getting the maximum SS benefit, too. I'm getting about 2700/mo total---but long term officials may be getting several thousand per mo,---plus maybe spouses getting similar deals. I know there is a lid on SS, but can you imagine these PC couples raking in 10k per mo. and not really having extraordinary skills?

And we have a similar culture among public employees. They have been really working to carve out a good, comfortable environment and blend into the PC culture.