Mr. President, Please Cut It Out

Washington Post ^ | July 26, 2017 | Kenneth Starr

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Mr. President, please cut it out. Tweet to your heart’s content, but stop the wildly inappropriate attacks on the attorney general. An honorable man whom I have known since his days as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, Jeff Sessions has recently become your piñata in one of the most outrageous — and profoundly misguided — courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital. What you are doing is harmful to your presidency and inimical to our foundational commitment as a free people to the rule of law.

The attorney general is not — and cannot be — the president’s “hockey goalie,” as new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci described Sessions’s job. In fact, the president isn’t even his client. To the contrary, the attorney general’s client is ultimately “We the People,” and his fidelity has to be not to the president but to the Constitution and other laws of the United States. Indeed, the attorney general’s job, at times, is to tell the president “no” because of the supervening demands of the law. When it comes to dealing with the nation’s top legal officer, you will do well to check your Twitter weapons at the Oval Office door.

A rich history buttresses my uninvited but from-the-heart advice. In the wake of President Richard Nixon’s resignation, the colorful Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) — a hero of the long Watergate ordeal — held hearings on a newly minted proposal to create an independent Justice Department, along the lines of other independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission. The idea was simple: Especially in the wake of the Nixon-era scandals infecting it, the department should, to the fullest extent possible, be insulated from raw political considerations in the enforcement of the nation’s laws.

[McCarthysGhost]

The swamp dwellers respect jail time. Trump needs leverage and a doj that goes after the swamp will help him get his agenda passed more than anything else.

[wildbill]

Wouldn’t that be the coolest ploy ever between a President and his AG. Pretend you are mad at him and threaten to fire him.

Then all the Dems who just want to oppose Trump get all teary -eyed about ultra conservative Sessions and what a wonderful AG he is as well as a “good” Southerner on civil rights.

Then Sessions lowers the boom on the Clinton crime syndicate and all the Deep State leakers and refuses to recuse himself on these issues because he isn’t under ‘investigation’ on them.

And then after folks are indicted, tried and go to prison, Trump and Session fess up to the charade necessary to neuter the Dems on Sessions.

Man, I hope you are right. Funniest coup ever in government service.