Is Donald Trump making a move on Jeff Sessions after all?
If you take a look at the people Donald Trump has fired over the past several weeks, the one constant has been that they’ve all been people he thinks he can get away with firing. He’s been doing this out of spite, because he knows he can’t get away with firing people like Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as that would blow back in his face immediately. However, it looks like Trump may be preparing to spitefully fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Three key pieces of evidence are at play here. The first, and most obvious, is that CNN reported late this week that Trump is considering firing Sessions and replacing him with embattled EPA boss Scott Pruitt. The second is that Trump made a point of specifically refuting this report in a tweet, which most of the time has turned out to be a giveaway that the report was in fact true. The third is that Trump spent Saturday afternoon launching one attack on the Department of Justice after another, which Sessions runs.
Maybe this adds up to something and maybe it doesn’t. Even if Trump is considering firing Sessions, that doesn’t mean it’ll happen any time soon, or ever. We saw six months of major media stories, almost surely planted by Trump himself, that he was imminently going to fire Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster before it finally happened. We’ve seen just as many stories about Trump supposedly firing John Kelly and other people who still very much have a job.
So it’s worth keeping an eye out for the possibility that Donald Trump might fire Jeff Sessions soon. It would certainly fit Trump’s recent pattern of taking out his frustrations by firing the people he can get away with firing. But this would likely have no impact on Robert Mueller. Trump would have a 0.0% chance of getting Scott Pruitt confirmed as Attorney General, which would merely put Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in charge of the DOJ indefinitely. In fact that would be the one reason Trump might not fire Sessions. Contribute to Palmer Report
