Former Trump lawyer John Dowd gave a superbly informative interview, published Wednesday, to the Washington Examiner’s own Byron York. But Dowd was way off-base in the potshots he took at former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The lawyer completely misrepresented the circumstances surrounding Sessions’ recusal from the Russia-related investigation. In so doing, Dowd exacerbated Sessions’ status as one of the most unreasonably maligned public servants in recent years.
First, here is what Dowd said about Sessions, as reported by York:
But didn’t Sessions have a legitimate reason? After all, the investigation was into the Trump campaign, and Sessions played a role in the campaign. “No, that’s nonsense,” Dowd countered. “That’s not a conflict. Bob Mueller had a business dispute with the president. He didn’t step aside.” Dowd attributed talk of a Sessions conflict to “blowhards” in the Senate.
Dowd wasn’t finished. “[Sessions] was just a miserable failure as an attorney general, I don’t feel sorry for him at all. [Trump] had good reasons to be upset with Sessions’ performance.” Beyond that, Dowd said, “The guy [Sessions] hurt him. He hurt him. He did tremendous injury to the president, and shame on him for doing it. And I agree with the president. I’d have fired the son of a bitch right away.”
Dowd is wrong on multiple levels and outrageously so on one of them.
The outrageous assertion is that Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation was a dereliction of duty, all because Sessions feared “blowhards” in the Senate. This is a flat-out smear. Sessions was advised to recuse himself by the Justice Department’s internal ethics office. Any attorney general who ignored such advice would deserve to be hounded from office. The public would have no confidence in such an attorney general or any investigation overseen by him. And that’s why the ethics office exists: to give an unbiased view to an official, in this case Sessions, legitimately uncertain as to whether he had triggered the grounds for recusal.
Sessions’ duty was to the rule of law, not to the personal needs of the president. Dowd is not just wrong but scurrilous in suggesting otherwise.
Furthermore, despite Dowd’s assertion, Sessions was correct not to call Trump before announcing his recusal. The “optics” of such a call would be bad, giving rise to all sorts of innuendos that the two had some sort of wink-and-nod agreement. Indeed, the recusal itself, by logic, suggests that Sessions should not further discuss the matter in any way with a president who was a possible subject of the probe.
Dowd is also wrong to say that Sessions’ recusal hurt Trump. Neither he nor Trump has ever explained how this could be so. Did they expect an attorney general to run improper interference for Trump? If Sessions had not recused himself, any exoneration of Trump would have later been seen as tainted. Instead, he put the investigation into the capable hands of his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who (until Trump started attacking him) enjoyed a spotless reputation.
Finally, Dowd unleashed the broader ad hominem attack on the overall job Sessions did as attorney general, calling him a “miserable failure.” A full column of its own could be devoted to praising Sessions’ performance, but for now, suffice it to say that former Attorney General Ed Meese led a large group of top conservative legal eagles in pleading with Trump to retain Sessions because of the superb job the Alabaman was doing in reforming his department’s operations.
Nonetheless, Dowd not only dumped all over Sessions’ performance but also resorted to name-calling against the famously polite and mild-mannered former senator. The old saying about SOBs is that it takes one to know one — but in this case, it takes one to hurl the epithet at somebody who doesn’t remotely fit the description.
