I was encouraged today by news that Democrats will be holding Senator Sessions accountable to ensure that he completes the required information and disclosures required by the Senate. There are so many problems with Sessions as an Attorney General nominee that it is difficult to know where to begin. I do not know how you put a person in charge of enforcing the Voting Rights Act when that person clearly does not believe in voting as a fundamental right. I do not know how you put someone in charge of enforcing federal hate crimes laws when he clearly does not believe in those either. He has a true basket of deplorable ideas, and all of those should be challenged. But at his confirmation hearings, there is another topic that I hope does not get lost:
Will Sessions promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s potential violations of the Constitution (through his potential receipt of foreign gifts, ongoing profiteering, and exacerbation of those issues through his family’s involvement) and other potential violations of federal law?
This should be a pretty easy promise for him to make for two reasons.
First, Trump said that he was going to instruct his Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. That, of course, is not how it works, but if the use of a private email server was enough to warrant a special prosecutor, then surely the tangled web of business interests, foreign investments, and cabinet picks that seem tailor-made to advance certain of Trump’s pecuniary interests needs a special prosecutor to unravel it. You can’t say that a private email server is the biggest deal ever and then pretend that known foreign financial entanglements are no big deal at all. And that is to say nothing about the multiple accusations of misconduct that Trump is currently facing in multiple lawsuits. Someone has to investigate those too. So if you thought Clinton needed to be investigated, as Sessions pretty clearly did, then you have to hold Trump to the same standard.
Second, and more importantly, Sessions was in the Senate in the 1990s. Under a different but analogous law, Kenneth Starr was appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno as independent counsel. Originally this was to investigate the Whitewater land deal, but his investigation ballooned to include multiple other issues, eventually including the Paula Jones lawsuit, which in turn led to the discovery of the Monica Lewinsky tapes. This, by the way, is a lesson in the importance of having these investigations of Trump in the first place—the only reason that anyone learned of the Clinton email server was through the interminable Benghazi investigations. Once you start investigating, there is always something more to be investigated. That’s what we need here. And there is no way that a justice department operating under a person who appears to have been picked primarily based upon his loyalty to Trump could be counted on to conduct the investigations fully, fairly, and without undue influence from Trump. The very fact that Trump seemed to think that he was the one in control of the decision to appoint a special prosecutor is evidence enough that he would not let a justice department investigation proceed independently.
One last point about Jeff Sessions—he voted to impeach President Clinton. Clinton was not impeached for having an extramarital affair; he was impeached for obstruction of justice, and perjury. After all of the investigating that Kenneth Starr did, this was what ultimately got Clinton impeached. So if Senator Sessions thought that obstruction of justice relating to a civil lawsuit that wasn’t even the original target of the independent counsel’s investigation was enough to warrant impeachment, then surely potential explicit violations of the Constitution are sufficient to warrant at least the appointment of a special prosecutor.
There are lots of good reasons for Senators to vote against confirming Senator Sessions. But setting those aside for a moment, whenever Trump finally gets around to doing whatever it is he is going to do with his businesses, there are going to be bigly grounds for appointing a special prosecutor. If Sessions refuses to promise to do so, Democratic Senators should say that he is ignoring potential violations of the Constitution and federal law, refusing to act independently, and undermining confidence in the entire government because his loyalty to Trump is trumping what should be his clear responsibilities. And then they should vote against his confirmation.
