The Trump administration hasn’t exactly maintained smooth sailing in its relationship with the justice system, although you’d hope for much better from a U.S. presidential administration. This week on The View, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe shared some of just how out of line the now former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was when he was still on the job. McCabe had served since well before Trump came around, but Sessions, of course, was a Trump appointee.
Host Sunny Hostin bluntly asked him:
‘Was he an appropriate person to lead the Department of Justice?’
McCabe explained:
‘The conversations that I had with Attorney General Sessions were unlike anything I had seen from any other attorney general — the obsessive focus on immigration, when in many cases it simply wasn’t relevant to the threats that we were discussing… the racist comments… it was a challenge to try and make sure that the attorney general was getting the benefit of the intelligence we were presenting him.’
Watch below.
Hostin had noted that in McCabe’s new memoir that he’s been promoting lately, he described Sessions as incompetent, having “rarely read his intelligence briefings” and even consistently confusing classified information for information that he picked up from media reports. He was committed to his Trump-ian ideologies, pushing a close scrutiny of suspects’ ethnic backgrounds no matter how irrelevant it was and even allegedly complaining that the Justice Department should only hire Irishmen — in other words, white people.
Those claims correspond closely to Sessions’ public behavior, not even including his dismal at best record on issues of race from past decades during his time as a U.S. Attorney. For instance, he distinguished himself through means like seeking to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or DACA — program meant to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as kids and seeking to draw back the types of violence that can warrant the determination of “credible fear” that’s needed for asylum claims. He claimed wide-ranging abuse of the asylum system, but there remains little evidence for the Trump administration’s fearmongering over immigration over the southern border. Both of those key Sessions pushes were eventually overturned in court.
Ironically, Sessions is stuck between a rock and a hard place these days, because the Trump team as led by the president himself isn’t exactly fond of him anymore. Just in recent days, Trump directly implicated him in supposed treason that McCabe and the still-serving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were planning via discussing whether Trump should be removed from office via the 25th Amendment, which covers situations where the president becomes unfit for office.
Some time after reports circulated that Rosenstein had floated the idea of him wearing a wire to capture the president saying something that could get him removed from office, McCabe confirmed that the conversations took place.
An unnamed senior administration official writing for The New York Times last year admitted to being part of a secret “resistance” effort inside the administration and also claimed that the 25th Amendment had been discussed.
Featured Image via screenshot from the video
