Jeff Sessions sells out Donald Trump
If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ve known all along that when it came down to it, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was never going to stick his neck out even a millimeter to try to save Donald Trump in the Russia scandal. Sessions recused himself more than a year ago, at the first sign that he might be in trouble, in order to take some heat off himself. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when push came to shove today, Sessions, sold out Trump again.
While it’s never struck us as particularly coherent, one of Donald Trump’s key plot points for getting himself off the hook has been the appointment of a second Special Counsel to investigate Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or to investigate the FBI, or to investigate Hillary Clinton, or simply investigate something. The idea was presumably to muddy the waters in the court of public opinion, so the second Special Counsel could declare that the Trump-Russia investigation by the first Special Counsel was a hoax or a fraud.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the first place, and who has continued to vouch for his work, was clearly never going to do Trump’s bidding by appointing a fraudulent second Special Counsel. Today, Jeff Sessions confirmed that he’s not willing to appoint a second Special Counsel either. Because he’s officially recused himself, making an appointment like this could open him up to additional obstruction of justice charges, and Sessions just isn’t willing to risk his own freedom to help Trump.
Jeff Sessions has appointed John Huber, a federal prosecutor in Utah, to poke around within the FBI, and to presumably come up with some phony evidence “exonerating” Donald Trump. But this won’t have even a small fraction of the impact that a second Special Counsel would have had. Trump desperately wanted Sessions to appoint another Special Counsel, and Sessions decided instead to sell Trump out in order to protect himself. This strongly suggests Sessions will selfishly cut a plea deal with Mueller against Trump when the time comes, if he hasn’t secretly done so already.
