In announcing his bid to regain his Senate seat in Alabama, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made an honest and compelling case about his own consistent record. He marred his by-the-book, Eagle Scout persona, however, by insisting that there is no merit in the investigation of President Trump’s actions with regard to Ukraine.
It is one thing to say he hasn’t seen anything yet that convinces him impeachment is necessary. It is another thing, not intellectually honest, to do as he did and dismiss the whole thing as merely “a continuous political attack.”
As former chief law enforcement officer in the land, Sessions should know better.
When months and months of a president’s actions lead multiple, respected officials to believe the president was acting in ways that were unethical, “improper,” “insidious,” and probably “illegal,” that’s a good sign that the questions are more than a mere political attack. This is especially so when some of these officials were his own appointees and some had careers in government that leaned decidedly Republican.
Trump’s behavior was so disturbing that the Intelligence Community inspector general and the director of national intelligence made two criminal referrals about it to the Justice Department. Multiple officials also made reports of concern to John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the White House National Security Council, who in turn joined CIA general counsel Courtney Simmons to make yet another joint criminal referral.
National security adviser John Bolton thought Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was so improper that he shut down a key meeting as soon as someone broached it and another time derisively referred to it (figuratively speaking) as “whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up.” (He was referring to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.)
Witness after witness has testified as to why the pressure campaign was improper, on multiple levels, and Giuliani himself has added to the fire by saying he was acting in a purely private capacity. This is not the first time Giuliani has said this, and it negates Trump’s argument that he was trying to conduct legitimate foreign policy.
Again, maybe somebody can make an argument that all of this, while serious, does not quite rise to the level of impeachability. To insist, though, as Sessions and most House and Senate Republicans are doing, that none of this is serious enough even to open a fair impeachment investigation, is to feign blindness to the obvious.
This sort of willful ignorance is the ethical equivalent of jury nullification. For a longtime federal prosecutor such as Sessions to engage in this behavior is especially ignominious.
Sessions is absolutely right that he behaved honorably while attorney general and honorably since, especially by refusing to take shots at Trump no matter how many unfair shots Trump took at him. He also is right to say that on Trump’s biggest agenda items, immigration and trade, “I was for this agenda before President Trump announced. … No senator in the Senate would be more effective at pushing President Trump’s agenda than I would be.”
Sessions is nothing if not sincere about his public-policy stances through the years. It’s one of his best qualities. It’s a shame that his excusemaking about Trump’s bad ethics should besmirch his otherwise exemplary record of probity.
