There are two very significant things you can observe when reading this Washington Post piece by Sari Horwitz and Robert Costa on the broken relationship between the president and his attorney general. The first is that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is willing to be obsequious in an effort to keep his dream job, but only up to a point. When it comes to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, he’s not willing to concede much to Donald Trump. Sure, he can understand why the president finds his decision frustrating, but…
“I’m confident I made the right decision, a decision that’s consistent for the rule of law,” Sessions said. “An attorney general who doesn’t follow the law is not very effective in leading the Department of Justice.”
…the president is angry with him for following the law. One day after the Post revealed that Sessions had met in his Senate office with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and failed to disclose it during his confirmation hearing, and a mere three weeks after he was sworn in as attorney general, Sessions held a press conference at the Department of Justice and announced that “I have recused myself from matters that deal with the Trump campaign.” He explained that he was following the advice of Justice Department lawyers. Trump is fuming mad that Sessions followed the legal advice of Justice Department lawyers. But imagine what it would have looked like if Sessions had ignored that advice. He would have invited a revolt by not only Congress, but also by the majority of people serving in the department he has just begun to lead. In particular, the FBI would have gone ape. It’s not unlikely that there would have mass resignations, and anyone trying to argue that Sessions wasn’t leading a cover-up of Trump’s actions and his own actions would have been left with no compelling rebuttal points.
Sessions admits as much. He’s saying that the president asked him to break the law and he’s sorry if his refusal to do so makes Trump angry but that’s just the way it had to be: “I serve at the pleasure of the president. If he wants to make a change, he can certainly do so, and I would be glad to yield in that circumstance, no doubt about it.”
The second significant thing you can observe in the piece is that Trump is now suffering from an age-old managerial problem. Those in positions of responsibility frequently find that their staff, for a variety of reasons, will seal them off from bad news down below or from hearing alternative points of view that are helpful in formulating policy. In this case, Jeff Sessions has some strong allies in the West Wing, including especially senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn (who was until recently a Senate aide to Sessions). But neither of them are willing to risk the Trump’s displeasure by advocating for Sessions directly to the president. Thus, the job of warning Trump off his plans to replace Sessions as attorney general has fallen to chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House counsel Donald F. McGahn. Since they aren’t personally close to Sessions, their advice can be seen as more neutral and more clearly as intended to be in the best interests of the president. Yet, even here, Priebus was constrained by worries about his own job security, and he was indeed fired late last week after the health care effort collapsed.
As a result, Trump isn’t getting as much internal pushback as he should on the political and legal perils of firing Jeff Sessions or moving him to another position in the cabinet. He may not realize just how seriously the Senate Republicans would take such an action, and he may not understand how it could help build a case for impeachment against him.
Let’s be frank. The president simply doesn’t have a normal human grasp of the concept of obstruction of justice nor of the principle of avoiding a conflict of interest. If he did, he wouldn’t be blasting Sessions for following the ethical and legal advice of Justice Department lawyers. He certainly wouldn’t be publicly admitting that he expected Sessions to obstruct justice and is furious that he did not. So, if anyone needs to be told hard truths from his staff, it’s Donald Trump.
Yet, his staff is afraid to explain these things or to explain them with enough force and repetition to be convincing.
Will new chief of staff John Kelly have more success? Does Kelly understand these things and their perils, and is he willing to start off his new relationship with the president by taking him on on this issue?
I guess we will find out, but so far it looks like Trump is hellbent on doing Robert Mueller’s job for him and making a rock solid case for his own removal from office. He does not have any respect for the law and he wants everyone to know this in the most irrefutable way possible.
DT believes down to his DNA that rules don’t apply to him. Standards, norms, laws, those are for little people. He’s special, a big shot. No force on earth will make him believe otherwise. What might be a little mysterious is the degree to which he will go out of his way to prove this to himself, vs. the degree to which he is naturally indifferent to rules. Or the extent to which he feels the need to lie about his rule-breaking vs. the need to brag about it.
“Power that doesn’t violate rules is not power, it is obedience.”
Simply anecdotal, but I’ve happened to have 5 conversations with different Republican voters recently – 2 in AL, 1 in TX and 2 in CA.
To a person, each one pretty much said the same thing to me: “Trump’s pissing off the libruls, so I like what he’s doing” or “Trump’s pissing off the libruls, so he ‘must’ be doing something right.”
Even my relatives in AL were still madly in love w/Trump despite his treatment of their former hero, Jeff Sessions.
Trump’s fans could give a stuff about trifling details about laws. Laws are for hurting minorities and the poors, not for what they think is “their kind.” And certainly piffling laws should not be applied to DJT.
Go figure.
As far as I could ascertain, none of these people really know what’s going on at all. Most of what they talked about was the absolute HORROR of dreaded Muslims who are somehow totally ruining their lives. One such person seriously adjured me that I should never go to socialist Stockholm because I will be immediately attacked by Muslims there.
And so forth. Draw your own conclusions. I doubt that most Trump voters even know much about what’s going on with Sessions, but I truly don’t know how Fox and Rush are propagandizing & spinning it.
I think your anecdotal observations are probably pretty close to the mark. I often have to remind my wife that most people she knows pay little or no attention that any of this. When she finds a Trump supporter or even those people who are basically apolitical, non-Trump supporters, and who are oblivious to all that is going on, she is simply dumbfounded that so many people simply do not care. She still has difficulty fathoming that so many people have almost zero interest in the massive catastrophe we are facing as a result of this situation. They got what they wanted, Donald Trump in the White House. So everything else that flows out from that is simply the sour grapes of whiny liberals or the discontent of the media elitists and “the establishment” in Washington, because Trump is upsetting their apple cart in the middle of the street.
I find that those I know who are Trump supporters, actually follow the news on a regular basis and are at least informed about on-going events, are consuming only the Fox News, Trump twitter-verse reporting on it, anyway. So in their minds, too, there is not “there”, there to any of the accusations.
At best, most Republican voters only listen to Hate Radio or watch Fox. My relatives in AL do just that, but, as indicated, the 5 Trump voters I talked to recently all came out – almost word for word – with the same talking points.
One of the CA Republicans went on & on & on & ON about Muslims. Thinks the Travel ban is the best. Was advising a friend and I where to travel (almost nowhere is “safe”), etc.
Yes, most citizens (not just Republicans) don’t pay much attention. Conservatives are just happy that Congress is R-dominated – even though they can’t get anything done – and their Savior is in their WHITE House.
It’s sad, frustrating and rather horrifying.
Y’all are forgetting Facebook. Tons of crackpot talking points get passed around via FB, even by people you might think might be able to know better. One of the latest is something about how the Russians paid the firm to create the “pee tape dossier”, and so that means Comey was colluding with the Russians…or some crazy thing. Of course, if you bother to check out the linked video of Congressional testimony you find out that no such thing was actually said. I pointed this out, and was attacked for liking Hillary.
True re Facedump.
I do not have an account, so thankfully I forget about it all the time.
Yes it is another source of bullshit, hype, lies, spin, and crackpot nonsense.
Right-wing authoritarians truly don’t care about reality.
They only know that whomever they view as a rightful authority figure, namely Strongman Trump, is always right, even when he’s wrong, because for fuck’s sake, a rightful authority is NEVER wrong.
Strongman Trump isn’t dangerous in the classical sense, minus him deciding to launch an internal or external war.
But, on an everyday basis, his right-wing followers are dangerous, because they hang on whatever Strongman Trump says, whether it be that they’re winning it up all day long, or that liberals, the media, and RINOs are destroying America and should be dealt with accordingly.
Failed Biznessman Trump operated his whole life as though “the law” was a joke. As the putative CEO of FailedNation, Inc, he certainly isn’t going to start understanding (let alone respecting) even the most obvious principles involving conflicts of interest. Hotels, golf courses, dividends, foreign payments, etc etc, are the least of the problem.
As a candidate and newly ensconced strongman Der Trumper, Trump became a political criminal (the term coined by German journalists who opposed the rise of Hitler and who paid with their lives). It was critical that Der Trumper ensure complete control of the law enforcement arms of his government. He thought he had accomplished that with the Littlest Confederate, so of course this hole in the armor must be sealed, whatever the cost. The Sessions recusal meant that Comey had to go. Now Sessions himself. Der Trumper has to get rid of Mueller somehow.
It would seem that Der Trumper has somehow gotten the idea that if Beauregard III goes, the recusal goes, so bureaucrat Rosencrantz goes, and thus the hated G-man Mueller goes. The thinking must be that this would put the whole Russia thing back in the lap of the newly minted AG–whatever craven “conservative” lickspittle is willing to take the job via August recess appointment. This is three dimensional chess for Trumper, haha.
That this seems quite a legally and politically doubtful chain of events doesn’t seem to matter much, once the idea has taken hold Trumper. And Heroic Generals are not much more attuned to conflict of interest principles than highflyin’ CEOs. In any event, after witnessing what he’s already witnessed yet still taking new Trumperite assignments, Gen’ral Kelly appears to be a Field Marshall Keitel figure, not even up to the resistance level of a General Jodl….
His ignorance and naïveté are leading him to jump from the frying pan to the fire. Ousting Sessions doesn’t get rid of Mueller (the one that he is panicking over — and that reveals he fears something being discovered). No Sessions and the senior official at DOJ becomes Rosenstein. He could fire him as well, and that would leave the Acting Solicitor General that could be bumped up to Acting Deputy AG (or AG), and he could fire Mueller and blow off any chance of being viewed as reputable. It would also put the kibosh on Trump’s Solicitor General nominee’s confirmation.
One constant in Sessions long career is that he hangs tough — even when he’s wrong (which is not the current situation). Thus, the odds that pressure from Trump will lead him to resign are extremely low. The Trumpsters (less than 40% of the general public) may cheer for the firing of Sessions, but in the relevant court of public opinion in this case — the Senate — it will put Trump in more trouble. It’s as if Trump is following Nixon’s playbook and doesn’t know that it didn’t work.
>>Can Anyone Persuade Trump Not to Fire Sessions?
I’d bet against it.
Good line from Mika in the Morning Joe segment I linked to here: “Trump doesn’t seem to understand that the Attorney General isn’t his lawyer.”
The idea of moving Sessions has set off some pretty weird speculation. Booman, would you care to comment on the legality of this? I saw something called the Vacancies Act cited.
But whether he’s moved or simply dumped, isn’t the goal still firing Mueller? I don’t see that happening without some uproar in the Justice Dept.
There’s a good article today by Ezra Klein at Vox about Trump’s lack of any loyalty to his assistants, and how that makes it even harder to replace them.
Which, if Trump had ever been a good businessman, he would have understood.
Or. The Mooch is out as comm director. Maybe another job? Kelly took him out.
Perhaps whoever persuaded him Trump removes Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director – reports . One week might be a record for a WH appointment.
I read that the Mooch was on the job for ten whole days.
Appears the Mooch was hired to get rid of Spicey and Priebus. Then Kelly was hired to fire the Mooch.
Who’s gonna fire Kelly?
Will DJT ever fire Sessions? Time will tell…
If that’s the case then the Mooch was hired to get rid of Priebus, whose replacement Kelly then got rid of the Mooch.
I don’t know how anybody comes out of this administration without a knife in their back.
It says Kelly wanted him out. Good move, if true. But bad pennies have a way of resurfacing.
not just a week, ten whole days. 🙂
that matters, the record will be in danger as long as Trump lasts.
you can’t make this stuff up.
Technically, I don’t think he officially started the job before getting canned. Meaning that his tenure as comms director was some number of negative days.
from that POV, he made a lot of impact in a job he never actually held.
The statisticians are gonna have a hard time with this admin! Asterisks will abound, such as:
*named but fired before assumption of duties
and
*position never filled
etc….
But who, oh who, will STOP THE LEAKS!
The person that can pry Trumps twitter machine out of his cold dead hands.
This may be Kelly attempting to clean house. If so, then we may expect things to be a bit more quiet and “normal” for anywhere from 1 week to 1 month before Trump blows up again. It’s possible I am being far too generous in these estimates.
Supposedly Kelly was not happy about the Comey firing, either, and Comey told him to stay on.
Unfortunately the behavior of the modern GOP has been consistent for over 10 years now. They are dishonest, they ignore common sense, science, and logic, they are hypocrites, they don’t take responsibility, they claim to be Christians but consistently honor money over morals, and they are cowards.
This may sound like an ad hominem attack but I dare you to show me actions that prove me wrong. I have dozens and dozens of examples that prove all my points.
Or you could just watch Fox News for a day…
The only things I would add are:
Faux News got them into the White House briefings, provided a Sunday News program with elected Republicans talking about their ‘serious’ issues. Listening to Rush and talking about him to non-listeners they knew was vaguely illegitimate. Kind of like the wingers lack of respect for NPR. But Faux News was ‘legitimate,’ especially for low info voters, which broadened the base of ‘dittoheads.’
At this point it’s not what Trump does that counts. It’s what the responsible people do in reacting to it.
This was precious though.
Stay as innocent as you are, Booman. It’s one of your endearing qualities.
Also, too, the FBI agents leaking against Hillary regret getting Trump elected. No really. Trust me on this.
Also, too, also, I guess the list of agents that quit in disgust when Comey was fired would be a pretty good indicator of just how they were committed to ‘going ape’ over some malfeasance at the highest levels.
Maybe I just missed those resignations headlines.
Or consider that even Mark Felt never resigned until he was accused of leaking by Ruckelshaus. These people in the FBI love their power and position as well as the self-image they create from it. You’ll have their resignations when you pry it from their cold, dead hands.