President Trump’s federal law enforcement quagmire this week can trace its roots back more than two years to staffing decisions and recommendations made by the transition team for the Justice Department.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions is once again being blamed for causing Trump a headache 15 months after he left office and as he now runs to regain his old Senate seat in Alabama.
In the days after Trump’s impeachment ended in acquittal, the next political conflict focused on Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department and whether Trump leveraged the agency to mount controversial investigations into his political rivals while twisting the system to protect his allies facing time in prison.
Undergirding the tug of war over the case of Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of the president who was charged with lying to Congress and witness tampering, is the conflict over the U.S. attorney who presided over the case and the prosecution of other Trump associates, which stems from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Jessie Liu, who led the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia until two weeks ago, investigated and suggested long sentences against Trump associates related to Mueller’s two-year inquiry but also cut plea deals and dropped cases for Trump opponents. The most recent example came Friday when former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe escaped the shadow of a criminal investigation.
Critics say Liu had an agenda against the president, evidenced by her office’s decision, even after her departure.
“She has hired some assistant U.S. attorneys who are venomously hostile to Trump and his views of justice in the last year. It makes me wonder what is going on there,” J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney during the Bush and Obama administrations who now serves as the president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Liu left her post at the U.S. Attorney’s Office two weeks ago after Trump tapped her to be undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, but her nomination was pulled prior to her Thursday hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. She then submitted her resignation to the Treasury Department, effective Wednesday.
Barr is said to have been instrumental in setting her up for the nomination before choosing his senior counselor, Timothy Shea, to be the acting U.S. attorney in D.C.
Liu, 46, was first tapped by Trump in 2017 to head up the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the nation. Her nomination, among other U.S. attorneys and DOJ personnel recommendations to Sessions, came after being part of the Justice Department transition team led by Brian Benczkowski, Chuck Cooper, and Ed Haden, the Washington Examiner has learned.
Benczkowski is a career attorney at the Justice Department and has been in its criminal division for the last decade as well as a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Haden was previously chief counsel for Sessions back on Capitol Hill. Cooper was Sessions’s personal counsel when the former Alabama senator was attorney general.
“I don’t know who was instrumental in getting [Liu] that job, but I do know that Sessions was very forthright in wanting lifetime prosecutors, and, of course, at that time, he was really, really tight with the president,” one source knowledgeable of the DOJ transition told the Washington Examiner. “He could have anybody he wanted.”
Sessions fell out of favor with Trump in 2017 when he recused himself from the Russia investigation, which was looking into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The president repeatedly berated his then-attorney general for the decision. Sessions resigned in November 2018, and, in 2019, Mueller concluded the Russia investigation having found no criminal conspiracy.
During Sessions’s tenure, other recommendations flowed in, including Jody Hunt, who became Sessions’s chief of staff from February 2017 until October of that year. Trump nominated Hunt, a career DOJ attorney since 1999, to be the assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s Civil Division, and he was confirmed by the Senate in August 2018.
Hunt, during his time as Sessions’s chief of staff, played a key role, the Washington Examiner has learned, in convincing Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Rachel Brand was another recommendation sent to Sessions to pass along to Trump that sprouted from the DOJ transition team. She was appointed to the No. 3 position at the Justice Department but lasted just one year at the Department before she left her post.
Brand, 46, according to the Justice Department, left the administration to take an executive-level job at Walmart. NBC News reported she exited because she feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation.
Tom Wheeler, an Indiana lawyer who was close to Vice President Mike Pence, also had a short stint leading the Justice Department’s civil rights unit after he was recommended by the transition team and his nomination was later confirmed.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Justice Department and Sessions’s campaign spokesman for a response and did not hear back before the publication of this report.
