By Paul Nachman
07/25/2017
Who knows if any of my message will get through. Or have any impact if it does. Still it seemed worthwhile to speak up.
For reasons that are probably above my pay grade (and I’m retired, anyway), President Trump is subjecting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to a campaign of public humiliation. According to today’s Washington Post:
Replacing Sessions is viewed by some Trump associates as potentially being part of a strategy to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and end his investigation of whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. On Tuesday, Trump renewed his attack on Sessions, accusing him on Twitter of taking a “VERY weak position” on alleged “crimes” by Hillary Clinton and intelligence leakers. The president had taken another swipe at Sessions on Monday, calling his attorney general “our beleaguered A.G.” and asking why Sessions was not “looking into Crooked Hillary’s crimes & Russia relations?” [Trump leaves Sessions twisting in the wind while berating him publicly, by Sari Horwitz, Matt Zapotosky, and Robert Costa; links in original]
If canning Mueller is the object, firebrand-but-savvy commentator Kurt Schlichter outlined how Trump should go about it in his July 24 column, Trump Needs To Be Smart About How He Fires Mueller, at Townhall.com. So perhaps (one can hope) Trump’s scourging of Sessions is actually part of something that’s intricately choreographed, with Sessions in on the plan. But I’m not optimistic that this is so, and Schlichter’s scenario, for example, doesn’t include anything like that.
Two of the principals at the popular PowerLine blog have also weighed in with their dismay over Trump’s behavior on this. Paul Mirengoff made an obvious point this morning:
After his election, Trump let it be known that he did not intend to prosecute Hillary Clinton. For his part, Attorney General Sessions has been focusing on the things Trump said he would do — notably, cracking down on gangs and illegal immigration — not the things Trump said he wouldn’t do — prosecuting Hillary Clinton. This has made our erratic president unhappy. If President Trump wanted to reverse course and have the Justice Department aggressively go after Hillary, he should have made this desire known to the Attorney General. Did Trump ever so instruct Sessions? Did he ever even inquire about the status of DOJ investigation[s] of Clinton? There is no indication in Trump’s tweets or other public venting that he did. [President Trump’s Sickening Treatment Of Jeff Sessions; links in original]
Mirengoff was following up on his colleague Scott Johnson’s post, The Beleaguering Of Jeff Sessions.
Aside from all this commentary, I was already disturbed about what’s going on (or apparently going on) between Trump and Sessions, so I wrote down some points to make before calling the White House’s comments line (202-456-1111). After waiting a few minutes on hold, I thanked the comments-taking operator for her service — they're all volunteers — and told her that my remarks were formulated as if I were talking face-to-face with the president:
I’m angry about your abysmal treatment of Jeff Sessions. Having him as Attorney General is crucial to your administration’s success.
And for someone who demands loyalty from others, your treatment of him is disgraceful — he was your first significant endorser. Where’s your loyalty?
Most crucial is what Sessions knows about immigration. It’s great that you read Ann Coulter’s book ¡Adios America!, but you still know almost nothing about the subject.
It’s an existential subject for the country, and Sessions understands this in its full depth.
So to have him lost from the Senate and then to be kicked aside as Attorney General would be a disaster for the survival of the American republic.
That would be disgraceful, as I already said.
Already disgraceful is the breaking of your promise to end DACA on Day One of your administration.
[Emphases as I spoke them]
The comments-taker was familiar with the term "DACA" (acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Obama’s outrageously unconstitutional administrative amnesty for the "Dreamers," inflicted upon the country in 2012) — I asked her. So maybe they've been getting calls on that.
She also said that, since I'd written my comments down, I might also want to send them in an email via the White House’s communications portal and even by snail mail. She acknowledged that paper mail takes awhile to get through the physical screening process but countered that it has relatively high impact.
So I've now done the former, and the latter will go out in this afternoon’s mail pick-up.
VDARE.com readers moved to do the same will find all the needed contact information at that communications portal.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.