US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions has resigned at the request of US President Donald Trump. Photo / AP
US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions has resigned at the request of US President Donald Trump. Photo / AP
To Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump was the man who could do no wrong. To Trump, Sessions was the Attorney-General who could do no right.
On questions of immigration, police work, and civil rights, the President could hardly find a more eager champion of his Administration's policies.
But on the issue that seemed to matter most to the President - protecting him and his White House from the criminal investigation into 2016 election interference by Russia - Sessions recused himself shortly after becoming the Attorney-General.
The President never forgave him. And today, Sessions resigned at Trump's request.
By the time Trump declared in September, "I don't have an attorney-general," even his torturous relationship with Sessions had become a subject of scrutiny for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Specifically, Mueller has examined whether Trump's efforts to pressure Sessions into resigning in 2017 might amount to an attempt to obstruct justice.
Sessions has said publicly and privately that he does not regret the recusal, believing it was the right course of action. According to a person familiar with Sessions' thinking, he has shared the president's frustration with the pace of the Mueller probe and would like it to be finished, but also feels that it is important for the country that the investigation continue unimpeded, so that its final results are accepted by the public.
As much as the shadow of the Russia probe has loomed over Sessions' tenure as Attorney-General, he has sought to make his time in that job about more than that - a return, as he calls it, to the principles of pro-police, anti-illegal immigration law enforcement.
In May, standing before a sparkling Pacific Ocean and a looming border fence, Sessions emphasised his vision for America.
"Today we're here to send a message to the world that we are not going to let the country be overwhelmed," Sessions said.
"People are not going to caravan or otherwise stampede our border . . . If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you. And that child may be separated from you as required by law."
Former US Attorney Matt Whitaker from Iowa will be acting attorney-general. Photo / AP
While the family-separation policy pursued by the Administration has been shelved, at least for now, the broader set of immigration actions pursued by Sessions became a central argument for Trump and the Republicans as they sought to retain control of Congress.
Avideh Moussavian, legislative director at the National Immigration Law Centre, said Sessions "came in with a very strong anti-immigrant ideology, and a very deeply ingrained world view that is rooted in exclusion".
Whether his directive that prosecutors bring cases against anyone who crosses the border illegally, his defence of Trump's ban of travellers from certain majority-Muslim countries or family separation, his effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme, which granted a reprieve from deportation to people who had come here without documentation as children, or his opinions attempting to restrict asylum, Sessions has "demonstrated a willingness to radically transform our immigration system in ways that run around Congress and are sort of death by a thousand cuts, if you will," Moussavian said.
"I think that he's trying intentionally to turn the immigration courts into fast-track deportation machines, and to turn immigration judges into mass deportation agents, and limiting their discretion," Moussavian said.
As the nation's highest law enforcement official for 20 months, Sessions will be remembered for remaining loyal to a President who turned virulently against him, even as that Attorney-General pushed Trump's controversial policies more aggressively than any other member of his Cabinet.
"In my view, there has never been a Republican attorney-general - a conservative attorney-general - who can be credited with more achievements in advancing the conservative legal policy agenda," said Charles Cooper, Sessions' longtime friend and lawyer and the former assistant attorney-general for the Office of Legal Counsel under President Ronald Reagan. "What he's managed to accomplish, despite the distractions, has been nothing short of astounding."
Cooper pointed to Sessions' undoing of Obama-era criminal justice policies, his immigration policies, and his push against drug trafficking.
"In virtually every area of legal policy, he has done exactly what conservatives like me had hoped and expected that he would do," Cooper said. "But he's done it more energetically, more effectively than we could have imagined."
Civil rights activists, however, view Sessions' achievements as troubling.
They point to steps he took to loosen federal protections for African-Americans and Latinos, along with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including restrictions on immigration and the Justice Department's reversal of Obama Administration policies on civil rights, criminal justice, policing and voting.
"Sessions has been terrible for civil rights in this country," said Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division in the Obama Administration who is now the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
"He's turned back the clock from trying to recreate mass incarceration policies to his view of the voting rights act as intrusive to his abdication of the mission of the civil rights division on a range of issues including addressing systemic police misconduct, voting rights and LGBQT rights," Gupta said.
Anyone who attempts to interfere with or obstruct the Mueller inquiry must be held accountable. This is a red line. We are a nation of laws and norms not subject to the self interested actions of one man.
Law enforcement officials in local communities also point to the aggressive approach Sessions has taken to fighting crime, both with his rhetoric and a string of new initiatives, particularly focused on the country's opioid crisis. The Justice Department, for example, has tripled it's prosecutions of fentanyl cases and last year brought the first cases charging Chinese nationals with selling large quantities of the drug to Americans.
Sessions proposed a change to national drug policy by limiting the amount of opioids that companies can manufacture each year. He created a team of agents and analysts to disrupt illicit opioid sales online, and started a unit to target opioid-related health-care fraud.
But civil rights leaders say they see Sessions' actions, particularly with regard to agreements reached with police in places like Chicago, as an effort by the Justice Department to walk away from its obligation to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide are following the Constitution.
Sessions also reversed the charging policy of former Attorney-General Eric Holder and in May 2017 directed his federal prosecutors to aggressively target drug traffickers and charge defendants with the most serious, provable crimes. Holder, five years ago, had directed his prosecutors to stop charging low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with offenses that impose severe mandatory minimum sentences.
Civil rights groups, some Republican lawmakers and even the conservative Koch brothers criticized Sessions' new policy, saying that he was taking the country backward after there had been a bipartisan consensus in Congress about criminal justice reform.
But many prosecutors praised the measure, saying it gave them more tools to do their jobs, which they felt had been taken away in the Obama Administration.
Sessions also methodically rolled back Obama Administration positions in court cases over voting rights.
Sessions' defenders point to several cases that illustrate a concerted focus on hate-crimes prosecutions under Sessions.
Since January 2017, the Justice Department has indicted 50 defendants involved in committing hate crimes and secured convictions of 51 defendants for hate crimes incidents, according to Justice officials.
