Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions, the Queens-born developer and the Alabama lawyer, are finding that similar positions on political issues can mask deep differences on underlying principles.
For Mr. Trump, who has excoriated his attorney general on Twitter and reportedly discussed firing him, what matters most is personal loyalty to him, or rather loyalty to whatever he thinks his needs are at any particular moment. For Mr. Sessions, fealty to the law trumps all. For Republicans nationwide, it’s an acid test: side with a mercurial president who demands devotion, or with the attorney general, who insists on probity and the letter of the law.
.. For better or worse, Mr. Sessions sees the world in black-and-white, law-and-order terms — criminals on one side and trustworthy law enforcement on the other. That’s one reason he has re-expanded the use of civil asset forfeiture, drawing intense (and deserved) criticism from across the political spectrum. He takes the same approach with illegal narcotics.
.. Moreover, he has deep faith in the American political system and its institutions. He is deeply trusting of the Justice Department’s criminal division; his highly regarded deputy, Rod Rosenstein; and the professionalism of the F.B.I. rank and file. In Mr. Sessions’ mind, removing himself from the equation put Mr. Trump in no more or less legal danger than before, because the facts and the law would lead where they would lead, regardless of his participation.
.. As a prosecutor, Mr. Sessions had a distinguished record of going after Republican officials accused of misdeeds and of declining to pursue Democratic officials he thought (correctly, as it turned out) were wrongly charged.
.. If he thought he was getting a lackey, a wingman or the political equivalent of a capo, he was sorely mistaken.
.. But any fair-minded person must grant that unlike his boss, Mr. Sessions has the courage of his convictions. He believes illegal immigration hurts low-skilled American workers. He believes illegal narcotics ruin lives. He believes (wrongly) that trade protectionism helps American workers. He backed Mr. Trump last year, despite concerns about Mr. Trump’s bombastic disregard for social norms to which Mr. Sessions himself adheres, because he saw Mr. Trump as a fellow believer who, for all his flaws, had the actual ability to achieve those ends.
.. They clearly are appalled by Mr. Trump’s one-way loyalty test.
.. But those statements of support for the attorney general were the easy part. How they follow through in the coming weeks, especially if the president fires him, will determine whether they are remembered as principled lawmakers or craven pols.
.. If Mr. Trump knifes rather than protects his friends, soon no friends will remain to watch his back.
Sessions’ powerful friends stand up to Trump
The attorney general’s former colleagues in Congress, as well as conservative allies, publicly questioned the president’s attacks on Sessions.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was among Sessions’ most vocal defenders Wednesday, when he seemed to almost be taunting the president, suggesting that his failure to fire Sessions showed weakness, while also hinting that the impact of such a move could be catastrophic for Trump’s presidency.
“He’s trying to get Sessions to quit and I hope Sessions doesn’t quit. If the president wants to fire him, fire him,” Graham said. “I think anybody who’s strong would use the power they have and be confident in his decision. Strong people say: ‘I’ve decided this man or woman can’t serve me well and I’m going to act accordingly and take the consequence.’ To me weakness is when you play around the edges and don’t use the power you have.”One conservative activist said that an effort is underway to coordinate and amplify such statements because of fears that Trump doesn’t understand the blow his administration and the conservative movement would suffer if Sessions departs.
.. Is this fight to have right now? The danger of this fight with General Sessions is he’s not only a loyal supporter of the president which sends a bad message to supporters, but he’s also getting the job done,” said the source, referring to Session’s initiatives on such issues as illegal immigration and toughening criminal sentencing.
.. Numerous prominent conservative voices have publicly rallied to Sessions side, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), former Trump transition domestic policy chief and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
.. Gingrich said on NPR early Wednesday. “I think that Jeff Sessions, in fact, was one of his earliest and most loyal supporters. I think Jeff Sessions is a solid conservative. I think, yeah, you can argue either way. I mean, even a guy like Rudy Giuliani, who’s very pro-Trump, said he would have recused himself.”.. The senators view Trump’s treatment of their former colleague as “offensive,” the source said... Some GOP senators also fear that if Trump pushes Sessions out, the results could be dire for Trump. Such a development might lead to mass resignations at the Justice Department and it might be impossible to find a majority in the Senate to confirm a replacement for Sessions, the source added... the president took another shot at Sessions Wednesday morning, faulting him for failing to remove acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.“Why didn’t A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives. Drain the Swamp!” Trump tweeted... Trump’s statement was puzzling because the president has the authority to name an acting FBI director and the White House publicly toyed with the idea of bringing in another FBI official to replace McCabe, but never did so.
.. Senior White House strategist Steve Bannon is the moving force in the effort to persuade Trump to back away from his public salvos at Sessions
.. American should be troubled by the character of a person who humiliates and turns his back on a close friend after only six months.
.. Schumer—who in March called for Sessions to resign over his contacts with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak
.. “Only Trump could make Sessions into a sympathetic figure,” said James Gagliano, a former FBI agent in New York and an adjunct professor of leadership studies at St. Johns University. “It’s unifying some factions I don’t think would ever have unified. Maybe he is a unifier.”
Jeff Sessions has done more for Trumpism than anyone. Trump still wants to ditch him.
Miller, once a Sessions acolyte, remains in the White House, his silence loudly suggesting that he’s content to let his old boss twist in the wind.
Over the past decade, conservatives have taken a hard look at criminal justice reform and concluded that our long-standing, tough-on-crime political war led to a system that was too punitive, too reflexive and too racially separate — to the point that just about the only bipartisan thing going in Washington right now is the joint bail reform initiative of conservatarian Sen. Rand Paul and San Francisco liberal Sen. Kamala Harris. But the Sessions Justice Department, consonant with the swaggering lock-’em-up rhetoric of the Trump campaign, has ordered federal prosecutors to aim for the toughest penalties in every case.
Non-Trump conservatives find the Sessions Justice Department’s expansive statism hard to swallow; his reiterationof the tried-and-failed War on Drugs is particularly repellent to those who claim to believe in federalism. Despite decades of Republicans advocating for power to flow back to the states and away from one-size-fits-all Washington regulatory and legal control, the “beleaguered” attorney general’s almost obsessive anti-drug crusade has focused on states that have passed marijuana decriminalization and legalization. Just the kind of showy but ineffective and unconservative policy that Trump routinely favors.
Sessions reversed an Obama-era reform that had been heralded across the political spectrum when he reapplied civil asset forfeiture regulations, allowing law enforcement agencies to seize property for people suspected of crimes — a move that law professor and conservative USA Today columnist Glenn Harlan Reynolds rightly argues is a message that “the feds see the rest of us as prey, not as citizens.”
Trump Says He Has ‘Complete Power’ to Pardon
President Trump on Saturday asserted the “complete power to pardon” relatives, aides and possibly even himself ..
.. “While all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us,” he wrote on Twitter. “FAKE NEWS.”
.. an article by The Post reporting that Mr. Sessions may have discussed campaign activities and policy with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, last year, despite his public statements to the contrary. In the article, The Post cited intercepted communications between Mr. Kislyak and his home office in Moscow. Mr. Trump excoriated the newspaper and expressed no concern about his attorney general’s conduct.
“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post, this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions,” Mr. Trump wrote. “These illegal leaks, like Comey’s, must stop!”
.. In the interview, Mr. Trump faulted Mr. Sessions for his misleading testimony. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
.. “My son Donald openly gave his e-mails to the media & authorities whereas Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted (& acid washed) her 33,000 emails!” he wrote.