Just one day after the 2018 midterm elections, and after months of harassment, President Donald Trump has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.
During his nearly two years running the Department of Justice, Sessions was the most important player in Trump’s crackdown on immigration — an effort to reduce the number of mostly Hispanic migrants entering the United States, which the president dressed up as protecting the “rule of law.”
As Vox’s Dara Lind put it: “If President Trump and all his appointees left office tomorrow, instead of Sessions, the mark Sessions has left on policy would be the most enduring.”
As to what happens next with the Muller investigation, Sessions will be replaced as acting attorney general by Matthew Whitaker — a man who once suggested special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt.”
Whitaker had served as Sessions’s chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions at the Justice Department. And while the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, would typically be tapped to take over in an acting role, Trump chose Whitaker instead.
Senate Democrats are trying to stop Whitaker from serving as acting attorney general
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) attend a markup of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blumenthal and Hirono are among the senators suing to block Deputy Attorney General Matthew Whitaker’s appointment as acting AG. CQ-Roll Call Inc.A group of Senate Democrats are suing to try to strike down President Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general.
The suit, filed in DC federal district court by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (CT), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), and Mazie Hirono (HI), argues that Whitaker’s appointment was unconstitutional because he was not confirmed by the Senate to his prior position.
Read Article >Matthew Whitaker’s appointment is the latest Trump tax the GOP is paying
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMatthew Whitaker is, by any standard, a wildly unsuitable choice to serve as attorney general of the United States.
He’s a small-time crook who finished fourth in the Iowa GOP Senate primary back in 2014. He apparently got his job as chief of staff in the Justice Department because Trump liked his TV hits, experience that would at best qualify him to be the DOJ’s chief spokesperson, not to be chief of staff and certainly not to run the Justice Department. Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, a prominent Washington attorney, says Whitaker’s appointment is illegal.
Read Article >Exclusive: Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton
Matthew Whitaker in August. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMatthew Whitaker, whom President Donald Trump named as his acting attorney general on Wednesday, privately provided advice to the president last year on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to investigate the president’s political adversaries, Vox has learned.
Whitaker was an outspoken critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe before he became the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in September 2017. That has rightfully raised concerns that Whitaker might now attempt to sabotage Mueller’s investigation. But new information suggests that Whitaker — while working for Sessions — advocated on behalf of, and attempted to facilitate, Trump’s desire to exploit the Justice Department and FBI to investigate the president’s enemies.
Read Article >“Protect Mueller” protests pop up across the country
People marching through Times Square on November 8, 2018, the day after President Donald Trump forced the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty ImagesThousands of protesters assembled across the country on Thursday night to show support for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The protests sprang up in reaction to a shakeup at the Department of Justice that has thrown the future of that investigation into doubt. On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly resigned, at the request of President Donald Trump. The president then moved to appoint Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, who will now oversee the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Read Article >George Conway: Trump replacing Sessions with Whitaker is illegal
Matthew Whitaker Chip Somodevilla/GettyPresident Trump broke the law when he appointed Matthew Whitaker to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, lawyers Neal Katyal and George Conway argue in a New York Times op-ed Thursday.
The problem, they say, is that Whitaker was not confirmed by the Senate. They argue that that violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which they say requires all “principal officers” of the government to be Senate-confirmed.
Read Article >We aren’t alarmed enough about Jeff Sessions’s firing
Trump and Sessions at a March speech. Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAttorney General Jeff Sessions’s firing wasn’t shocking. And that, on some level, should shock us.
For months now, President Trump had been humiliating his top law enforcement official, belittling him in public and yelling at him in private, in a clear attempt to force his resignation. Practically everyone in Washington had assumed Sessions would be gone after the midterms; it turns out Trump couldn’t even wait a full day after the polls closed to pull the trigger.
Read Article >Jeff Sessions’s carefully built deportation machine will outlast him
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesJeff Sessions’s resignation as attorney general Wednesday, the day after the 2018 midterm elections, was only surprising in that it took nearly two years.
President Trump soured on Sessions — an early champion of Trump and key campaign adviser — weeks after the attorney general was sworn in, as soon as Sessions announced he would recuse himself from the ongoing federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Read Article >Read Jeff Sessions’s resignation letter
Attorney General Jeff Sessions at an October press conference. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty ImagesEmbattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned on Wednesday afternoon at the president’s request. Effectively, that means he was fired, but the administration didn’t quite want to phrase it that way.
As a result of this arrangement, Sessions penned an official resignation letter, which is common for departing Cabinet members. Much of it focuses on what he sees as his accomplishments in office; to my mind, the most interesting part comes in the second-to-last paragraph.
Read Article >Jeff Sessions is out as US attorney general
Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned on November 7, 2018. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump’s fury over the Russia probe has just led to the ouster of the man who most embodies Trumpism — and who played a key role in Trump’s surprise election win in 2016.
On Wednesday, just one day after the midterm elections, Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign, ending the longtime Alabama senator’s nearly two years running the Department of Justice.
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