Jeff Sessions has tendered his resignation, at the president’s request. Less than 24 hours after the 2018 midterms drew to a close, Donald Trump has forced his first attorney general out of his administration, clearing the way for a man who has publicly accused Robert Mueller of taking the Russia investigation “too far” — and mused that a new attorney general could thwart his probe by denying it funding — to become the Justice Department’s interim leader.
As a member of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of ties between that campaign and the Russian government. The president has long decried Sessions for refusing to subordinate this ethical obligation to his (imaginary) duty to immunize the commander-in-chief from legal liabilities. But Matthew Whitaker has no conflict of interest in the Russia case. And although he will not (immediately) inherit direct supervision of the Mueller investigation, he will have the power to seal records, withhold funding, and disrupt the probe by other means — as Whitaker himself once explained in his capacity as a CNN talking head:
Appearing on CNN in July 2017 — before he was in his current position as Sessions’s chief of staff — Whitaker mused about a scenario in which Trump might fire Sessions and replace him with a temporary attorney general. Whitaker noted that federal regulations still gave the attorney general power over the budget for a special counsel. That temporary replacement, he then said, could move to choke off Mueller’s funding.
“So I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment,” Whitaker said, “and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
Whitaker is a former U.S. Attorney and 2014 Senate candidate in Iowa who joined the Justice Department last fall. Here are a few other things that he has publicly claimed to believe:
• Robert Mueller has no legitimate authority to investigate the Trump Organization’s finances, and if he does (which, he has), “then this would raise serious concerns that the special counsel’s investigation was a mere witch hunt.”
• Donald Trump was right to fire James Comey — because James Comey should have prosecuted Hillary Clinton:
Comey’s announcement last July that he would not recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton for violations of the Espionage Act were a shock to many in law enforcement both inside the FBI and out…[H]is pronouncement that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring such a case was just wrong, and I said so publicly at the time. I was a federal prosecutor for five years and was proud to serve in the Department of Justice, and I would’ve brought that case.
Clinton set up an entire secret, unsecured communications structure outside of the government she was charged with serving at the highest level; she was the Secretary of State. Classified information that, in the wrong hands, could potentially bring harm to our country – and many in service to our country — was available to be appropriated.
(Whitaker has never called for any investigations into — let alone prosecutions of — the Trump administration’s many, many, many violations of information security protocol.)
• All federal judges should be “people of faith” who take “a biblical view of justice.”
• The Supreme Court is “supposed to be the inferior branch of our three branches of government,” and has claimed far too much power for itself. Specifically, Whittaker says that Marbury v. Madison — the case that gave the court the power to strike down duly enacted laws — was wrongly decided, as the Supreme Court should not be “ final arbiter of constitutional issues.”
But if there’s one thing Whitaker hates more than the Supreme Court striking down laws it regards as unconstitutional, it’s when “unelected judges” refuse to strike down laws that conservatives don’t like:
Unelected judges are deciding many of the issues of the day. There are so many (bad rulings). I would start with the idea of Marbury v. Madison. That’s probably a good place to start and the way it’s looked at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional issues. We’ll move forward from there. All New Deal cases that were expansive of the federal government. Those would be bad. Then all the way up to the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate.
• There shouldn’t have been an independent counsel’s investigation into Russian interference because there wasn’t such an investigation into the Obama administration’s many scandals:
Calls for an independent counsel or commission to investigate allegations that Russia tried to interfere with our elections ring hollow when similar calls for special counsels during the scandals of the Obama administration were dismissed out of hand by the same people making these demands now.
So, clearly, Matthew Whitaker would make a sober, fair-minded, and trustworthy overseer of the Justice Department’s transformation into Donald J. Trump’s private detective agency.
