Today, Explained - thank u, next (Attorney General remix)

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is out. His replacement has criticized the Mueller probe. Is the investigation safe? Vox’s Andrew Prokop isn’t so sure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today explained comes from Quip electric toothbrushes, a better electric toothbrush. Here's what's better about it. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25. Your first set of refills is free when you go to getquip.com slash explained. And after that, refills are just $5 every three months. Andrew Prokrop, you're a senior correspondent here at Vox. Jeff Sessions is out as attorney general. Was this a firing or is it a resignation?

Well, he did not know when he woke up Wednesday morning that it would be his last day at the Justice Department. Chief of Staff John Kelly called him and told him basically to resign. In the letter Sessions released, he said he was asked to resign. Reportedly, Sessions asked if he could stay in the job until the end of the week, and John Kelly said no. So it doesn't look very voluntary. And why did Trump ask for his resignation? Is this the classic you recused yourself from the Mueller investigation, or is there something else going on here? That's basically the heart of it.

Back in March 2017, Sessions decided to recuse himself from any investigations into the 2016 presidential campaign. And Trump has been completely furious at him since then. Trump publicly berated him to try to pressure him to resign. Sessions resisted those pressures and was backed by Republican senators at the time who thought that the president pushing out an attorney general for reasons pertaining to an investigation into him, meaning that he wouldn't recuse himself, would look really, really corrupt. But for some reason, these Republican senators seem to have decided that it's OK to do it after the election. So the Republicans pre-election aren't on board because it would look hella corrupt. What changed between then and now?

I think a few things changed. First is that, you know, time passed. And since that first crisis, he's stayed in the job for over a year. After the midterms is a general time to make changes in your cabinet. I think the other thing that changed is that Trump has been fighting back in the court of public opinion about the Mueller investigation and has been trying to delegitimize it, discredit it. He has pretty effectively polarized opinion in the country about the Mueller investigation.

It's toxic to be too supportive of Mueller. Trump has kind of effectively delegitimized it in the minds of his supporters as a witch hunt. Who is Donald Trump going to replace Jeff Sessions with in the immediate aftermath of this resignation? Generally, when you fire the attorney general or ask him to leave, the deputy attorney general would take over, which would be Rod Rosenstein. That is not what is happening here. Trump has gone out of the line of succession to name Sessions' chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, to the job of acting attorney general while he tries to find a replacement.

So I guess there are two unusual things happening here. One is that he didn't even leave Sessions in the job long enough to figure out who he was going to permanently replace him with. And second is that once he did ask Sessions, he didn't just let Rosenstein take over, but picked this other guy who has some pretty concerning stuff in his record of public statements about the Mueller investigation specifically. Tell me more. So Whitaker, just to tell you a bit about who he is first, he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa under George W. Bush for a few years. And that's his main Justice Department experience. Since then, he's been kind of bouncing around Republican politics and various legal and business stuff. And then in the summer of 2017, Whitaker became noteworthy for going on CNN and attacking the Mueller investigation. There is no evidence, and we would

know by now, as much leaking as there has been, that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. There is no criminal obstruction of justice charge to be had here. There's just the evidence is weak. No reasonable prosecutor would bring a case on what we know right now. He wrote a column which was called, Mueller's investigation of Trump is going too far. He warned Mueller not to look too closely at Trump's finances and said, Any investigation into President Trump's finances or the finances of his family would require Mueller to return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority under Mueller's appointment as special counsel. relationships without a broadened scope in his appointment, then this would raise serious

concerns that the special counsel's investigation was a mere witch hunt. But this was before he was chief of staff? This is when he was just a commentator in the media. And here's the thing. He has reportedly told people that he was doing this specifically to get Trump's attention because Trump watches cable news all the time. So whereas this might have disqualified him from working in the Department of Justice under a different president, under this president, it made him an appealing candidate? It sort of looks like a job audition in some ways. The big question with this firing and replacement is,

what does this mean for the Mueller investigation? So there are three scenarios here. Number one is that Whitaker is coming in as kind of a hatchet man to end the probe. Fire Mueller, shut everything down. That is obviously the most worrying scenario, but there are a couple of reasons to think that might not happen. There are legal problems with firing Mueller. Whitaker himself could be on the hook for obstruction of justice if he does this. So he may not go that far. So then scenario two is that Whitaker lets Mueller continue,

but kind of reigns him in. Whitaker himself has talked about. I can see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment and that attorney general doesn't, try to cover up a report that Mueller writes, make sure it's not released to Congress or publicly. And then there's number three, which is that actually it kind of turns out fine that Whitaker, whether due to fear of exposing himself to legal jeopardy or political blowback, that he just doesn't interfere much. I mean there are even already calls for him to recuse himself because of his past comments about the investigation. Right. Now Trump is said to not believe that Whitaker would recuse himself. Seems unlikely.

They might have talked about that beforehand. Yeah. But if they talked about it, that makes the whole obstruction of justice risk worse. Right. So there is a kind of, you know, wink wink aspect to how Trump might want this interfered with because because all this might end up in a courtroom someday. So what's next for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, sessions the third is is he gonna try and get his senate seat back is is he gonna retire to alabama do we have any idea so sessions's senate seat was of course the um one that democrat doug jones surprisingly won in a special election last year

sessions is is 71 years old i don't know if he would necessarily want to go back to the Senate. It's a possibility, and he would be the favorite to win. But also, he might just want to let someone new have a shot. This has been a kind of stressful couple years for him as attorney general, and he might want to enjoy some time to himself. Up next on Today explained how Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III went from being a fringe politician to being the nation's top cop to being fired the day after the election. I'm still on this mission to figure out what I should do with the Quip electric toothbrush that's on my desk, and I'm so appreciative of the emails that have come in. Mark says, I've found that sonic toothbrushes are great for manually fertilizing tomatoes. The vibrations make them release pollen. Good to know, Mark.

I don't have any tomatoes. It's fall here in D.C., but next year maybe. Sandy says, brush your dog's teeth with it. Let your pets have the quip experience. Thank you, Sandy. My dogs are in Los Angeles, so that's not really going to work out. Derek says, hand over the quip toothbrush to the mysterious Breakmaster

Cylinder and see if they can jam with it. Good idea, Derek. The quip is quiet, unfortunately, so it might sound a little John Cage-y. Ross wants to know if I can jam with it. Good idea, Derek. The quip is quiet, unfortunately, so it might sound a little John Cage-y. Ross wants to know if I can turn the quip into a taser, but I think there's enough violence in the world, Ross. And then like five of you in a row, some in these United States, one from Australia, one from Canada, all at once wanted to know if the quip would clean up tiling grout. I don't know, and I don't know if I can find out by tomorrow, but I'll do some serious thinking about what I should do with this quip, and I will get back to y'all.

In the meantime, you can go to getquip.com slash explained if you're interested in the quip. They start at $25, your first refill is free, and after that, they're five bucks every three months. Another thing I wanted to tell you about is the Weeds podcast from Vox. It features all of our smartest political reporters every week getting into the weeds on this week's political news, getting into the weeds on policy. Matthew Iglesias is almost always there. Ezra Klein drops in, Sarah Cliff,

Jane Koston, Dara Lind, all of your favorite Vox people can be found on the Weeds podcast. It's available wherever podcasts are sold, but the best thing about podcasts is they're totally free. Subscribe now. They have a great election special that came out yesterday that you can listen to to get started. Thanks. Where did Jeff Sessions come from, Andrew? Sessions is from Alabama. He was a lawyer. He got a job in the Justice Department, U.S. Attorney's Office in Alabama in the 1970s and then was named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama under Reagan in the 80s. But where he really first came to national prominence was in 1986 when Reagan nominated him to be a district court judge.

And the nomination blew up spectacularly. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. He was brought face-to-face with things he personally had said. So what happened was that various colleagues of Sessions who had worked under him in the Justice Department in the past came forward and said he made various racial comments. That the NAACP and the Civil Liberties Union are un-American organizations. These comments that you could say

about a commie organization or something, I may have said something like that in a general way that probably was wrong. He had joked that he thought that the KKK was fine until he learned that they smoked pot. Sessions denied making some of the comments and said others were taken out of context. I am not a racist. I am not insensitive to blacks. It was really a spectacle of confirmation hearings at the time.

Coretta Scott King wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee and wrote that also his record was very concerning, saying that he had used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. It's inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a United States or federal judge. It all ended up with the nomination failing.

So he went into politics instead. I've heard the joke made that Sessions was too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge, but just racist enough to get elected as a United States senator. Damn. He won the Senate election in 1996 and stayed there for the next two decades. So how's he as a senator? Sessions really did distinguish himself by staking out some very unusual for the chamber positions on two major issues, trade and immigration. So on trade, Sessions was really a, for a Republican, quite skeptical of free trade agreements, wanted more protectionism, felt that American workers were getting a raw deal

in these international trade deals. The really big one was immigration, though, because this is an issue that the Senate has been debating for well over a decade. And every time it's come up, every time the issue is a big deal nationally, Sessions has been there, staking out a position so far to the right that it goes well beyond what almost any other Republican senator would have considered acceptable. In 2007, he dealt President George W. Bush a painful blow, helping defeat a bipartisan bill that would have created a guest worker program for undocumented immigrants. You've got to have this amnesty. You've got to give up, and we'll have amnesty.

And in exchange for that, you guys, we'll have a legal system that will work in the future. But it won't work. Did he have any friends in the Senate? Was he well liked? Or was he this outlier sort of fringe character? I think personally he was liked enough, but he wasn't entirely taken seriously because he was so far outside the mainstream. And he was not just anti-illegal immigration. He's kind of anti-all immigration. And he went pretty far out there in the early 2000s especially to make this case when very few others in the Republican Senate caucus would go that far. And he found an important ally at the website Breitbart with Steve Bannon there, and they had similar views on this stuff.

Also in the Senate, Sessions had a staffer who has since become very well known, Stephen Miller. He was Sessions' top aide who was in charge of immigration policy. People have told me that it's like Sessions downloaded his brain to Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller uploaded his brain to Trump. Sessions was a sort of John the Baptist figure preparing the way for Donald Trump. So he and Bannon link up before Trump's a serious figure in the 2016 presidential election. Do they find Trump? Does Trump find them? How does that work? Sessions and Trump are both going on Breitbart and being interviewed by Bannon. They're kind of in the same circles. But I think it was a really important moment in the primary campaign when Sessions actually became the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump.

I am pleased to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States. This was a moment when the Republican establishment was still very much against him. And it was a big moment. It was a validation from a sitting U.S. Senator. And it was one of the most raucous Trump rallies I went to in 2015 and 2016. We can't have everything, can we, Mr. Trump? But I can tell you one thing. I think at this time, in my opinion, my best judgment, at this time in American history, we need to make America great again. After Trump unexpectedly wins the presidency, Sessions kind of had his pick of jobs. And the job he wanted was attorney general.

And the reason he wanted it is because he really has cared about these policy issues, anti-immigration. And it was Jeff Sessions' dream to be able to put his ideas, which were fringe in the Senate, into practice with the power of the Justice Department. And so he got the job of attorney general and almost immediately his tenure became consumed with controversy over the Russian investigation. So he and Trump have this sort of match made in heaven relationship up until basically the moment he becomes attorney general, and then it all starts to fall apart. Yeah, so what happened is that Sessions had met the Russian ambassador for a formal meeting once and had another incidental contact with him during the campaign. But when he was asked about it at his Senate confirmation hearing, Sessions said, any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference

with any campaign or election in the United States. So he followed the guidance he had been given by the Justice Department ethics team, and he announced that he would recuse himself in March 2017. My staff recommended recusal. They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation. And that's where it all went wrong between him and Trump. Trump was furious. After Sessions recused, Trump tried to pressure him to unrecuse himself. He publicly berated him. He made various private comments attacking him for recusing himself, saying he wouldn't protect him. All of that is of interest to Robert Mueller, who was trying to establish a pattern or examining whether there's a pattern of the president obstructing justice.

So did he get anything done in the Justice Department outside of immigration where his policies aligned pretty well with the president? Yeah, he basically tried to veer the department very far to the right on all sorts of issues from civil rights to drug policy to criminal justice in general. When some Republicans have been supporting criminal justice reform, he's been a very hardliner on that issue, voting rights too. He's been an extremely conservative attorney general and what's kind of ironic about this is that under ordinary circumstances, without this Mueller investigation, liberals would be overjoyed if Jeff Sessions was

fired. He'd be probably the person in the cabinet they most want to be fired. Here's the thing, we started off friends. It was cool, but it was all pretend. Yeah, yeah, Sessions is gone. It's funny, Jeff Sessions, he's this guy who had real concrete ideas about policy, but those ideas were too fringe for the Senate, but those ideas get him to the highest echelons of American politics. They land him next to the president of the United States, and then he's immediately dumped. He's immediately ghosted by Donald Trump. I mean, will that be his legacy? Is that how he'll be remembered? I mean, Sessions will have an extensive policy legacy. I mean, his immigration moves alone have been enough to upend the lives of many immigrants who are here. Like Sessions would never have gotten to where he is without Donald Trump. But once he did get to where he was, the top of the key federal cabinet department overseeing law enforcement in the United States. He really did make the most of it.

Sessions is gone Support for Today Explained comes from Quip electric toothbrushes. They're approved by over 20,000 dental professionals. That's like a marathon's worth of dental professionals. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at $25 and your first set of refills is free. And after that, they're about $5 every three months. Getquip.com slash explained.