https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/jeff-sessions-president-trump-tweet-attacks-unwarranted/President Trump’s latest tweet tirade at his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, hits the trifecta. The president appears unaware that internal investigations are legally required if Justice Department officials are accused of misconduct. By blatantly politicizing the investigation of FISA abuse, he makes the investigation more challenging to conduct. And he is making it increasingly difficult to recruit, confirm, and retain quality appointees at the Justice Department and elsewhere in his administration.
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As for his report on Comey, it is not late. It is said to be imminent and was always expected to be filed in the March–April time frame. Now, even if the report turns out to be scrupulously fair and critical of the FBI’s performance, Trump has ensured that his detractors, and perhaps the subjects of the investigation, will claim it was influenced by political pressure from the White House.
The same is true of the investigation of FISA abuse. We have urged that the attorney general appoint a strong United States attorney from a district outside Washington to conduct a full-blown probe of the investigations that became intertwined in the politics of the 2016 election. The probe would examine whether the Clinton emails and Trump-Russia investigations were conducted evenhandedly, whether decision-making was driven by partisanship rather than evidence, and whether not only Justice Department protocols but criminal laws were broken — including the laws against leaking classified information. But such a probe will be discredited from the start if it is politicized, or perceived as such.
Meanwhile, with vital Justice Department leadership positions already unfilled, the Department’s No. 3 official has just resigned after less than a year in office. With a razor-thin majority in the Senate after Republicans managed to lose the Alabama seat Sessions held for two decades, it has become a difficult feat to confirm Trump nominees. Is now really the moment for the president to be trying to drive his attorney general out the door?
If the president does not want “Obama guys†running the Justice Department, he has a strange way of showing it.
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