Jeff Sessions. (photo: AP)
Jeff Sessions: This Time, It's Personal
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
30 July 17
The Attorney General of the United States supervises all federal
prosecutors, and one of the rituals of the job involves visiting the U.S.
Attorneys' offices across the nation. When Jeff Sessions, who is now (that
is, at this precise moment) the Attorney General, stopped in at the
Philadelphia office the other day, President Trump had already made the
first of what would be several public critiques of the nation's chief
law-enforcement officer. On this occasion, Sessions did not respond
directly, but seemed to make an almost poignant attempt to reingratiate
himself with his boss. Departing from his prepared remarks, he said, "I do
my best every day to be faithful to the laws of the Constitution of this
United States and to fulfill the goals of the President that I share." The
President, apparently, was unappeased, because during the next several days
he continued his stream of spoken and tweeted insults, calling Sessions
"beleaguered" and "VERY weak," and declaring himself "very disappointed"
with his Attorney General.
On one level, this exchange resembled a reality-show version of a reality
show, in which Sessions, a long-in-the-tooth apprentice, sought to avoid
hearing Trump tell him, "You're fired." But this black comedy of manners
obscured a clearer tragedy of state. Trump wasn't taunting Sessions because
of any policy differences between them but, rather, as usually seems to be
the case with this President, for personal reasons. The core of the
President's grievance is that the Attorney General recused himself from the
investigation into possible Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016
election, thereby setting in motion the process that led to the appointment
of Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Sessions did the right thing;
according to prosecutorial ethics, he cannot supervise a review of a
campaign in which he played a prominent role. Trump's willful
misunderstanding of the obligations of an Attorney General reflects a larger
flaw in his Presidency and in his character-his apparent belief that his
appointees owe their loyalty to him personally, rather than to the nation's
Constitution and its laws, and, more broadly, to the American people.
Every President has wide latitude in directing his appointees to implement
the policy goals on which he campaigned, and no member of the Cabinet has
worked more assiduously to advance Trump's agenda than Sessions. He has
reversed the Obama Administration's commitment to voting rights, which had
been reflected in Justice Department lawsuits against voter-suppression laws
in North Carolina and Texas. He has changed an Obama-era directive to
federal prosecutors to seek reasonable, as opposed to maximum, prison
sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Similarly, he has revived a
discredited approach to civil forfeiture, which will subject innocent people
to the loss of their property. He has also backed away from the effort,
championed by his predecessors Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, to rein in and
reform police departments, like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, that have
discriminated against African-Americans.
Although candidate Trump promised to protect L.G.B.T. rights, President
Trump last week vowed to remove transgender service members from the armed
forces, and Sessions's Justice Department, along the same lines, took the
position in court that Title VII, the nation's premier anti-discrimination
law, does not protect gay people from bias. Most of all, Sessions has
embraced the issue that first brought him and Trump together: the crackdown
on immigration. Sessions's subordinates have defended the President's travel
ban on refugees and people from six majority-Muslim countries, and Sessions
has stepped up enforcement of the laws that prevent undocumented immigrants
from settling in the United States.
All these initiatives are unwise, unjust, and counterproductive, but they
nevertheless represent the kind of change that tends to occur when an
Administration of one political party takes over from the other. Elections,
it is often noted, have consequences. President Trump's behavior, however,
represents a different kind of change-one that threatens the basic norms
underlying our system of government. No President in recent history has
treated his Attorney General solely as a political, or even as a personal,
functionary. When Alberto Gonzales, who served as the Attorney General under
George W. Bush, fired U.S. Attorneys for failing to do the bidding of the
Republican Party, Gonzales, quite properly, lost his job, too. He had
violated a principle that, until now, seemed inviolate: that the Attorney
General serves the public, not the political interests of the President who
appoints him.
Trump's fixation on the personal allegiance of members of his Administration
also led to his decision to fire James Comey as the F.B.I. director. As
Comey recounted in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Trump repeatedly pressed him for his loyalty-demands that Comey tried to
finesse, until the President abruptly ended his tenure. Congress set the
term of F.B.I. directors at ten years, in order to establish a standard of
political independence for them; no President had heretofore violated that
tradition out of personal or political pique. But, as bad as the decision to
fire Comey was, and as lamentable as Trump's attempted defenestration of
Sessions is, the President may be heading toward even more dramatic
departures from American norms in the near future.
Trump now seems set on terminating Mueller's investigation, which he could
attempt to do by directing the head of the Justice Department (whoever that
winds up being) to fire him. This, of course, would be reminiscent of
President Nixon's determination, in October, 1973, to fire Archibald Cox,
the Watergate special prosecutor. But a dismissal of Mueller would be worse.
Nixon clashed with Cox over what was at least an arguable matter of
principle-specifically, whether the prosecutor had the right to subpoena the
White House tapes. Trump wants Mueller gone simply because he doesn't want
to be investigated. An order to fire Mueller would be an abuse of power, but
one in keeping with the way that Trump has conducted his Presidency. On the
Saturday night that Cox was fired, he said, "Whether ours shall continue to
be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately
the American people" to decide. So it remains today.
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