The message was worded, as these messages often are, in the first-person plural—the royal “We”: “We are pleased to announce that Matthew G. Whitaker, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, will become our new Acting Attorney General of the United States. He will serve our Country well. We thank Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his service, and wish him well! A permanent replacement will be nominated at a later date.”
At last, after almost two years of hectoring from the White House and speculation from everywhere else, Sessions will leave the administration.
Sessions was among the first public officials to embrace Donald Trump’s populist message—he was an America Firster from the beginning—and became a formal adviser to the campaign. In his confirmation hearing in January 2017, he was asked if he had ever had any communications with Russians during the campaign, and he said he had not. In fact, as he clarified in March 2017, he had two conversations with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, once briefly after a speech in Washington, second in a meeting with two members of his staff in his capacity as U.S. senator. He denied that these meetings had anything to do with the Trump campaign and insisted he did not intend to mislead the Senate.
It was a mess of his own making. Either through faulty or selective memory, Sessions had made himself a minor but compromised figure in an ongoing FBI investigation into other Trump campaign officials—primarily Michael Flynn, who had communicated with Russian officials and then lied to the vice president about it—and their interactions with Russians before the election. As the newly confirmed attorney general, Sessions was in charge of the Justice Department, which was conducting the investigation into a campaign in which he was a part.
So, in his announcement on March 2, he began by noting that in his confirmation hearing he had promised “If a specific matter arose where I believe my impartiality might reasonably be questioned, I would consult with the Department ethics officials regarding the most appropriate way to proceed.” Sessions said he did so and that his staff recommended that the most appropriate thing he should do is recuse himself.
“They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” he said. “I have studied the rules and considered their comments and evaluation. I believe those recommendations are right and just. Therefore I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign.”
It was a principled move—and the only proper one. Earlier that day, President Trump was asked if Sessions should recuse himself—and Trump said no. The recusal ought to have been seen by Trump as helping him. The media and Democrats were ready to bury Sessions over the lapses in his confirmation testimony. Sessions got out for ethical reasons—he has always been an institutionalist and a believer in the value of procedure—but getting out was also in the president’s interest.
The president, of course, didn’t see it that way. He wanted to fight the investigation, which he was eager to portray as a sham. As early as February 2017, according to James Comey’s congressional testimony—and there is no reason to doubt his characterization in this instance—Trump asked the then-FBI director to “let this thing go” with Flynn. Comey describes Sessions “lingering” after Trump asked all others to leave the room so he could meet with the FBI director privately. After that, Comey had asked Sessions not to leave him alone with Trump anymore.
By recusing himself, Sessions signaled his opposition to Trump’s ethically dubious spurning of the Russia investigation. If the president was going to threaten the independence of the Justice Department—something Sessions and other Republicans rightly criticized Barack Obama and Eric Holder for—then Sessions wasn’t going to make things easy for him. The move angered the president and, as time went on, clearly ate at him. His irritation became acute when Rod Rosenstein, Sessions’s deputy in charge of the FBI’s Russia investigation, named and empowered a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to oversee a broader investigation into Russia’s involvement with the Trump campaign.
Whatever one suspects about Trump’s or the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with the Russians, this much is plain: Trump thought Sessions’s top priority was to protect Trump, and Sessions did not. Trump thought Sessions should behave like an corner-cutting attorney in the Manhattan real estate biz; Sessions thought he should behave like the head of the Department of Justice. The attorney general’s scrupulosity angered Trump not just because it in his view it caused a lot of trouble, but also, perhaps especially, because Sessions was loyal to the Trump agenda—an immigration restrictionist, a trade protectionist, a tough-on-crime law-enforcer. And so Sessions became a whipping boy, the president alternately questioning his judgment in public and berating him on Twitter. Sessions once offered to resign, according to the New York Times, but Trump declined, and the A.G. wouldn’t go on his own. True believer but institutionalist, empowered but insulted, Sessions stuck to his guns until the end.
A president has every right to fire his attorney general and hire one more to his liking, of course. But in this instance, as Trump knows well, the new acting attorney general has not recused himself from the Mueller probe and has repeatedly questioned its legitimacy. The Justice Department has announced that Whitaker will now oversee the Mueller investigation. There are real questions about whether he can do this—or how.
Trump critics charged immediately that he replaced Sessions with Whittaker in order to put a more manageable subordinate between himself and the Mueller investigation. The president has provided ample evidence to support such a conclusion, demonstrating throughout his presidency an easy willingness to subvert the rule of law in favor of the rule of Trump. If this is, in fact, one of these instances, it will soon be obvious to everybody—and the president will have revealed himself once again to be the reckless fool his harshest critics have always alleged he is.
He is not a king.
