Jeff Sessions’s Grave Conflict of Interest
by Murray Waas
Last year, in March 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions enlisted his subordinates to lie on his behalf that he did not know he was under federal investigation when he fired then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—an investigation initiated by McCabe and overseen by him until it was taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
By doing so, Sessions and his allies succeeded in shutting down a major controversy. If it had been made public that the attorney general had knowingly fired the deputy FBI director (and later, acting director) who’d opened and supervised that criminal investigation, the resulting scandal would have engulfed Sessions and would likely have even more seriously threatened his already tumultuous tenure as attorney general. Besides the scrutiny of the media and Congress, Sessions might have faced an inquiry by one of the Justice Department’s internal watchdog agencies, the Department’s Inspector General or Office of Professional Responsibility, as well as incurring the wrath of an already embittered president.
A government official with first-hand knowledge of the matter told me that the attorney general therefore instructed aides to make false statements in briefings to the press. The official’s account of what was at stake for Sessions is corroborated in part by a mass of evidence in the Mueller Report detailing the special counsel’s investigation of the former attorney general.
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Sessions fired McCabe early on the morning of March 16, 2018. The firing was controversial for a number of reasons: McCabe, as the FBI’s second-highest-ranking official under former FBI Director James Comey, was a witness in the special counsel’s investigation of whether the president had obstructed justice in firing Comey. Trump and his legal team—as well as Sessions—would have known that if Trump was charged with obstruction upon leaving office, McCabe would almost certainly be a crucial prosecution witness against the president, as well as a potential witness against the president in any impeachment proceedings.
In early 2018, at the president’s direction, according to a report by Axios, Sessions pressured FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire McCabe, a request that Wray considered so improper that he threatened to resign if Sessions’s demands continued. Some law enforcement officials believed that Trump’s attempts to have McCabe fired, using his own attorney general, might constitute a possible obstruction of justice by one or both men.
McCabe’s termination appeared particularly vindictive—a little over twenty-four hours before he was due to retire from the FBI and become eligible for a full pension earned during a twenty-one-year career at the agency. President Trump had earlier taken a personal interest in the matter, browbeating McCabe on Twitter two days before Christmas: “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”
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http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/15/jeff-sessionss-grave-conflict-of-interest/
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