The humiliation of Jeff Sessions
The humiliation of Jeff Sessions
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By Chris StirewaltPublished July 20, 2017Fox News
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THE HUMILIATION OF JEFF SESSIONS
There is something more than a little jarring in the ongoing humiliation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
In an ill-timed, ill-focused interview with the NYT, President Trump revisited his disdain for Sessions, his first, most-ardent and most-loyal supporter in the Senate.
When supporting Trump was still considered career suicide, Sessions donned the red cap anyway. Maybe it will prove fatal for Sessions’ career, after all.
The president has not made a secret of the fact that he blames Sessions for the scandal that now engulfs the Trump administration, claiming in contravention of all available evidence that somehow if Sessions had not recused himself from the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign that his White House will not be under siege.
“How do you take a job and then recuse yourself?” Trump asked reporters rhetorically. “If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair – and that’s a mild word – to the president.”
Sessions seems an odd target for Trump’s blame, given how other members of his inner circle including his son, his son-in-law, his former campaign chairman and his former national security advisor have all laid the president open to the scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller.
But it is evident that Trump sees Sessions decision as a personal betrayal and that the president expected the attorney general to protect him from such inquiries. This suggests that Trump did not know Sessions very well when he picked him, since the Alabamian’s devotion to procedural probity is well known in Washington. He’s never been much for cutting corners.
There simply was no way for Sessions to oversee an investigation into a campaign of which he was a part. It’s not complicated.
Here’s where Trump’s cynicism trips him up. The president no doubt believes that Sessions’ predecessor, Loretta Lynch, quashed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of state secrets. Trump might think that it would be only appropriate for his attorney general to do the same for him.
Trump’s 2016 pitch was centered on the idea that he, as a lifelong manipulator of a rigged system, was better suited than anyone to be in charge. Some may have thought that this meant Trump would know how to clean up Washington. But perhaps others just wanted him to win at the same dirty game.
As we hear the president and his defenders complain about things that Clinton and her husband got away with over the years, it occurs to us that the House of Clinton, the most ethically compromised, scandal ridden political operation since at least Richard Nixon’s goon squad, makes a rather poor benchmark by which to measure good conduct.
Sessions obviously believed that Trump wanted to use his knowledge of the rigged game to clean it up. He may have misunderstood.
Now, Trump is contemplating what he no doubt feared from the time he launched his presidential campaign: That his entry into public life could bring down his family business.
The president knows that Mueller and his team are rooting through Trump’s finances. He can imagine Mueller leafing through Trump’s unreleased tax returns, poring over case files and deal books from Trump’s past business dealings with Russians. And that means all of it might one day come out in a report or at a trial for one of his “satellites.”
The NYT interview as well as Trump’s statements and his behavior makes it plain that he sees Mueller as corrupt and intent on harming him and his family. And in Trump’s own oft-repeated moral code, a punch deserves a counter-punch.
Trump’s decision to grant the interview and his comments suggesting that he might yet try to stop the investigation, maybe by even firing Sessions, his deputy Rod Rosenstein and even Mueller himself reveal how much Trump is focused on the subject and the magnitude of the threat he believes it represents.
Think of it this way: Trump agreed to sit down with the paper he says is relentlessly unfair to him about the Russia investigation on the very day that he was supposed to be trying to revive moribund health insurance legislation in Congress.
The furor over his eldest son’s previously undisclosed meeting with Kremlin-connected figures was just dying down and the window for salvaging his first-term agenda was still barely ajar.
But Trump could not keep the focus on the business at hand even for a day. About 20 minutes of salesmanship for the bill on which hangs so much of his agenda was all he could muster.
It is certainly fair to say that Democrats and many in the establishment press are fixated on the Russia probe. But so is Trump. Maybe you think that’s appropriate because maybe you believe, as Trump does, that it is a witch hunt aimed at destroying his presidency over baseless charges. But if that’s so, then that’s all this presidency will ever be: A long battle to protect Trump from his persecutors.
Sessions won the ire of many conservatives this week by reinstituting rules allowing prosecutors to seize the property of criminal suspects without a trial. He has, of course, long been the object of contempt on the left for his stances on a variety of issues, especially lately with his crackdown on illegal immigration.
Taking and defending these unpopular views that are part of the core principles on which Trump ran is something Sessions does without batting an eye. And in an administration not consumed by a scandal surrounding the president and his inner circle, an attorney general so unflinching might be treated as a star cabinet member. Arguably, Sessions has been Trump’s most effective lieutenant.
Sessions, though, apparently misunderstood his job description.
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