After his election to the Senate, Sessions joined the very Judiciary Committee that had once rejected him and served as a very right-wing member—criticizing not just “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants but legal immigration, promoting the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, proposing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and opposing repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule and efforts to end discrimination in the military, and seeking at every turn to undermine a woman’s right to choose. (As a senator, Sessions sponsored legislation to “defund” Planned Parenthood and demanded that the Department of Justice (DOJ) launch investigations into the health care provider. When Sessions was nominated for attorney general, Planned Parenthood and seventy groups that defend access to reproductive health and abortion rights objected; their letter said the Sessions nomination raised “reason for concern for all who value the safety of women’s health providers and their patients.”) Sessions probably did not note the irony in the fact that, as someone who continues to bemoan the scrutiny he faced as a judicial nominee, he emerged as one of the Senate’s most ardent critics of the judicial nominees of Democratic presidents. He led the opposition to the Supreme Court nominations by Barack Obama of Justices Sonia Sotomayor (complaining that Sotomayor had engaged in thoughtful discussions of how the perspective of the judiciary could be broadened by “the presence of women and people of color on the bench”) and Elena Kagan (employing what Politico referred to as “jarring comments” to question whether the former Harvard Law School dean “had the intellectual honesty, the clarity of mind, that you would expect on the Supreme Court of the United States”). And when Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Sessions did not just oppose President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland as a replacement; the senator’s office announced that “no nominee will receive a hearing.”
Despite his “southern gentleman” manner, Sessions served in the Senate as a fierce partisan, a rigid ideologue, an unapologetic obstructionist and a cutthroat partisan operative. To a greater extent than any other senator, he cleared the way within the Republican Party for the politics of Donald Trump.
Still, even Republican insiders were a bit surprised early in 2016 when Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump for president and quickly emerged as the most prominent defender of the candidate’s outrageous words and deeds. Even as other top Republicans avoided entanglement with a presidential contender who seemed always to be on the verge of a public meltdown, Sessions embraced the opportunity to deliver the speech nominating the billionaire for the presidency at that summer’s Republican National Convention. In the fall, Sessions integrated himself and his staff into the Trump campaign. That integration would come to haunt Sessions when it was revealed that he had failed to divulge his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the summer and fall of 2016, even after he was asked straightforward questions about those contacts by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and Minnesota senator Al Franken. Those deceptions would eventually lead to calls, from Republicans as well as Democrats, for Sessions to recuse himself from inquiries into connections between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians. His decision to answer those calls and distance himself from the investigation calmed critics but infuriated Trump.
Sessions was not close to Trump before the 2016 campaign began. His support for the billionaire was rooted in ideology and enthusiasm for eventual Trump campaign CEO Bannon. Sessions was a big fan of Bannon’s bombastic approach at Breitbart; when reporter Reid Cherlin encountered the senator from Alabama at a 2014 dinner with Bannon, Cherlin recalls:
“I asked Sessions some questions about his relationship to Breitbart, mostly to be polite to my hosts. He surprised me by giving Breitbart credit for fatally poisoning a congressional immigration-reform deal that he himself had crusaded against. ‘You might not think it could’ kill the bill, Sessions said, ‘but it did.’ He told me that he read the site almost daily and that his constituents regularly quoted Breitbart articles to him by author name. ‘From my perspective, Breitbart is putting out cutting-edge information that’s independent, geared to the average working American, that’s honest and needs to get out.’”
When Trump prevailed on November 8, 2016, Sessions was in the thick of the president-elect’s transition process and, within weeks of the election, the president-elect nominated his most ardent congressional backer to lead the Department of Justice.
“Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General, Could Overhaul Department He’s Skewered,” read the banner headline in the New York Times, which noted that “Mr. Sessions has a growing list of gripes about how the Obama administration has run his old department, from its ‘breathtaking’ stance on immigration to its ‘shameful’ refusal to defend a federal ban on gay marriage.” No one doubted that George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley was right when he said: “The Justice Department is likely to be one of the most transformed departments in the cabinet in a Trump administration.” Change was in the air. But had Jeff Sessions changed?
Republicans stumbled over themselves to vouch for the nominee, while media outlets noted the seventy-year-old senator’s “courtly” manner. Trump claimed that “Jeff is greatly admired by legal scholars and virtually everyone who knows him.” But that simply was not the case, as Alabamans tried to make clear to the nation. Albert Turner had passed, but his widow just laughed when she was asked whether the man who had prosecuted her was ready to serve as attorney general. “While my husband and I were trying to help black people vote in Alabama, Jeff Sessions was trying to put us in jail,” Evelyn Turner explained. She recounted the story of her acquittal on charges pursued by Sessions, but she did not stop there. Turner noted that “as a senator, Jeff Sessions has voted against affirmative action and federal hate crimes laws and supported voter suppression laws. He has been a leading opponent of criminal justice and sentencing reforms. He has whitewashed his real history on race, exaggerating his past to paint himself as a champion of school desegregation and as a righteous prosecutor of the Ku Klux Klan.” She was not alone in arguing that Sessions had not changed. Those who had watched him most closely were most dubious.
“Despite 30 years of our nation moving forward on inclusion and against hate, Jeff Sessions has failed to change his ways,” said Benard Simelton, the president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP. “[Sessions has] been a threat to desegregation and the Voting Rights Act and remains a threat to all of our civil rights, including the right to live without the fear of police brutality.” Alabama NAACP members were so opposed to the Sessions nomination that they occupied the senator’s Mobile office and were arrested for civil disobedience. “This is too important for us to sit idly by and let our country turn back time,” explained Simelton.
Voices of opposition and concern rose from across Alabama. John Saxon, an Alabama attorney, who once served on a federal appointments committee that recommended nominees for Alabama federal judgeships, warned that “the senator has a problem putting African Americans on the federal bench in Alabama.” When President Obama nominated an African American jurist, Abdul Karim Kallon, to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in 2016, Alabama legal observers were hopeful because Sessions had not blocked Kallon’s selection to serve on a lower court bench and because seemingly everyone agreed that Obama was right when he said that “Judge Kallon has a long and impressive record of service and a history of handing down fair and judicious decisions.” The American Bar Association rated Kallon “Unanimously Well Qualified.” Yet, the nomination languished for 327 days in the judiciary committee where an Alabaman, Sessions, served, and had all the stature and connections that were necessary to advance it. After the 114th Congress finished its business on January 3, 2017, the Kallon nomination was returned to Obama. “When Obama nominated Kallon to the vacant 11th Circuit seat in February 2016, Sessions opposed his confirmation,” noted Mother Jones magaz
ine, which explained that “one-quarter of the residents of the 11th Circuit, which represents Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, are black—the highest percentage of any federal appeals court in the country—but only one of the court’s 11 judges is African American. The seat on the court reserved for an Alabaman has never been held by a black judge.” Alabama state senator Hank Johnson told the magazine that when efforts were made to diversify the federal bench, “it was definitely Jeff Sessions that was preventing the appointment of an African American.”
That wasn’t the only problem that Alabamans had with Sessions. “We have known Senator Sessions for many years,” explained Richard Cohen, the president of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “But we cannot support his nomination to be the country’s next attorney general. Senator Sessions not only has been a leading opponent of sensible, comprehensive immigration reform, he has associated with anti-immigrant groups we consider to be deeply racist, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Security Policy. If our country is to move forward, we must put all forms of racism behind us.”
This broader concern about Sessions’s commitment to oppose all forms of racism was raised by national civil rights groups. “Do not allow Senator Jeff Sessions to become the U.S. Attorney General,” read a petition that was signed by more than one million Americans and submitted to the Senate in early February by a coalition that included the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, People For the American Way, UltraViolet, Color Of Change, Common Cause, Friends of the Earth, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Rock the Vote, Faith in Public Life, Voto Latino, Free Press, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, among others. “He has fought the U.S. government’s (including the Department of Justice’s) efforts to protect the rights of marginalized people, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and immigrants. Trump’s appointment of him as U.S. Attorney General is a blatant affront to these people,” the petition declared. “It would be outrageous to let him lead the Department of Justice.”
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights president Wade Henderson explained that the signers “believe that Senator Sessions would be a disaster for civil rights, for the rule of law, and for an independent Justice Department. Senator Sessions has built his career on demonizing people of color, women, the LGBT community, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees.” Sessions, said Henderson, was “entirely unfit to be the Attorney General.” Rashad Robinson, the executive director of the group Color Of Change, was even more forthright. “Our question for members of the Senate is simple: do they support racism, or do they not?” asked Robinson. “In 1986, the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee refused to confirm Sessions to the federal bench. In 2017, the Senate should be just as unequivocal: ‘no’ to racism means ‘no’ to Jeff Sessions.”
Not a single Republican would do what Republicans had done thirty years earlier. While those who knew Sessions said he had not changed, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, had changed a great deal. Even supposedly “moderate” GOP senators embraced the nomination. The Judiciary Committee and then the Senate split along party lines and narrowly approved Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general. “I have never witnessed anything to suggest that Senator Sessions is anything other than a dedicated public servant and a decent man,” Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told committee members, before repeating a talking-points claim that Sessions “is not motivated by racial animus.”
But Evelyn Turner, who had kept a close eye on Sessions over the years, was not buying it. “Sessions has not changed. Have you ever known a leopard to change his spots? I haven’t,” she said. “Sessions is still a racist.” The survivor of the zealous prosecution by Jeff Sessions of voting rights activists expressed her fear “that Sessions would fail to emphasize or enforce civil rights laws and protections.”
“I am fearful," she concluded, that “Sessions would support policies that would make it more difficult for black citizens to vote.”
Within days of Sessions’s swearing in as attorney general, the Department of Justice rescinded orders protecting transgender students and to phase out the use of private prisons by the federal government, undoing years of work by coalitions of civil rights and social justice groups. Then, on February 27, 2017, the Department of Justice announced that it would literally switch sides on the issue of voting rights in Texas. One day before a legal team that was challenging the Lone Star State’s overly restrictive voter-ID law, which critics asserted was developed by Republican lawmakers to discriminate against African American and Latino voters, the Sessions DOJ withdrew from the six-year-long voting rights initiative. It was, Salon noted, “the first major voting rights case the DOJ faced under Sessions, who called the Supreme Court’s [2013] gutting of the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance provision ‘good news, I think, for the South.’”
For voting rights advocates, however, it was something else altogether: confirmation that Evelyn Turner was right to be fearful that the man the white nationalists could not wait to get installed as attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, “would support policies that would make it more difficult for black citizens to vote.”
— 7 —
THE LAWMAN WHO FORGOT WHICH SIDE HE WAS ON
Rod Rosenstein
Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein is a very powerful man, with immense authority and an even more immense duty to the republic he has sworn to serve as a U.S. Department of Justice lifer who literally started fresh out of Harvard Law School, in the Attorney General’s Honors Program that steers ambitious young barristers into public service, and has now risen to the office next to the corner office. If Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the chief executive officer of the U.S. Department of Justice, then Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein is the chief operating officer. Rosenstein has his hand in everything, at least in part because there are so many things that the scandal-plagued Sessions is not supposed to be handling.
Unfortunately, Sessions cannot keep his scandals to himself. So it was that, just days after assuming his position, the man who had been sold to the U.S. Senate and the nation as a proper minder was drawn into the crisis of confidence that is Jeff Sessions.
In early March 2017, the Washington Post revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Sessions was a close counselor and top surrogate for Donald Trump, he spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Sessions acknowledged the meetings following the Post report. That created a problem for the newly installed attorney general. When Sessions appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Trump’s nominee to fill the nation’s chief law enforcement position the previous January, he announced: “I did not have communications with the Russians.” In response to a written question from Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, about whether he had been “in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day,” Sessions responded with one word: “No.”
The Washington Post report put a spotlight on Sessions, and it was not flattering. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said: “Jeff Sessions lied under oath.” It was hard to argue with the conclusion. Unless we imagine that Sessions is far too absentminded to continue to serve as attorney general (a circumstance no one who knows the guy seriously entertains), then there can be no question that this man engaged in a blatant attempt to deceive the very Senate that was charged with determining whether he would take charge of the Department of Justice.
The new attorney general had to think fast. Sessions determined that he could avoid accountability by announcing that he was recusing himself from any examination of Russian involvement with President Trump’s campaign. It worked. The heat was off—for two months.
But the inquiry into Russian ties to the Trump campaign was only beginning. And the headlines grew more and more unsettling:
Washing
ton Post: “FBI Director Comey confirms probe of possible coordination between Kremlin and Trump campaign” (March 20, 2017)
Wall Street Journal: “Trump Team’s Ties to Russia: Who’s Who” (March 31, 2017)
New York Daily News: “FBI used controversial dossier on Russia-Trump ties to obtain warrant to spy on ex-campaign aide Carter Page” (April 18, 2017)
New York Times: “Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the FBI’s Attention” (Apr 19, 2017)
CNN: “Sources: Russia tried to use Trump advisers to infiltrate campaign” (April 21, 2017)
NPR: “Yates, Clapper To Testify In Senate Hearing On Russian Election Meddling” (April 25, 2017)
Voice of America: “FBI Chief to Face More Questions on Russia’s Activities During Election” (May 4, 2017)
New York Times: “Private Hearing With Intelligence Chiefs Revives House Inquiry on Russia” (May 4, 2017)
The heat was not just still on. Indeed, the temperature was rising. And Trump was getting agitated. Really, really agitated. Politico reported that Trump “had grown enraged by the Russia investigation,” and that the president “repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear.” Shortly, Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey, who by many accounts was focusing more attention and resources on the Russia inquiry, was expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 11, 2017. Trump moved from agitation to action. Comey was going to be fired. Paperwork was needed to justify the termination. But it would not do to have Sessions write it, as he had supposedly recused himself. So it fell to Rod Rosenstein to pull together a memo making a case against Comey.
Rosenstein delivered a credible bill of particulars, as might be expected from a permanent fixture in and around the U.S. Department of Justice for almost three decades, who had served since the early 1990s in the public integrity section of the Criminal Division, a special assistant to the Criminal Division assistant attorney general, an associate independent counsel, a principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Tax Division, an assistant U.S. attorney, the U.S. attorney for the U.S. district court for the District of Maryland, a member of the attorney general’s Anti-Gang Coordination Committee and a member of the Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys and Subcommittees on Violent and Organized Crime, White Collar Crime, Sentencing Issues and Cyber/Intellectual Property Crime. The guy certainly knew how to write a legal memo, and he also knew his way around controversial inquiries: he was a key player on the team of prosecutors that independent counsel Ken Starr used to put together allegations of wrongdoing by President Bill Clinton.