By David French
Monday, April 23, 2018
We live in an era when political role models are hard to
find, integrity is at a premium, and it’s exceedingly difficult to find people
or institutions who seem willing to put country over party, to set aside the
powerful pull of tribalism and self-interest and fulfill their oaths of office.
In the aftermath of yet another dramatic week in Washington, it’s becoming
increasingly clear that there are two men in the Trump administration who are
doing all that reasonable men and women could ask to both carry out the lawful
agenda of the president and fulfill their ultimate duty to uphold and defend
the Constitution of the United States.
Those two men are Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Let’s consider the events of just the past two weeks.
After withering left-wing criticism of Session’s decision to fire former deputy
FBI director Andrew McCabe, an inspector general’s report emerged that
vindicated the attorney general. Yes, McCabe did lie — and he lied repeatedly —
about leaking to a Wall Street Journal
reporter during the closing days of the 2016 presidential election. McCabe
deserved to be fired. He may even deserve to be prosecuted.
This vindication came days after Deputy Attorney General
Rosenstein reportedly approved an FBI raid on the president’s personal lawyer,
Michael Cohen. The Cohen raid was said to have resulted from a referral by
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who uncovered evidence of potential criminal
wrongdoing connected to Cohen’s payouts to a Playboy playmate and a porn star
who claim to have had affairs with Trump. As Trump reacted furiously, the Washington Post reported that Sessions
told White House counsel Donald McGahn that he might resign if Trump fired
Rosenstein — a principled stand that is exactly right for a political
appointee. Sessions serves at the pleasure of the president, but he can leave
whenever he so chooses, and if the demands of the job conflict with the oath of
office and/or the dictates of his conscience, he should leave.
The role played by Sessions and Rosenstein in these
recent events is of a piece with their conduct throughout the Trump presidency.
It’s fashionable for progressives to mock members of the Trump administration,
to label them “cowardly” or “complicit” in the administration’s wrongdoing. But
that is an utterly unfair assessment of the Trump Department of Justice.
Jeff Sessions properly and prudently recused himself from
the Russia investigation. Rod Rosenstein properly and prudently appointed a
special counsel after Trump fired FBI director James Comey and misled America
about the reasons.
In fact, the Trump DOJ has even produced not one,
but two
damning assessments indicating that the FBI took improper actions during the
2016 campaign that hurt Hillary Clinton
— thus directly contradicting the favored GOP “deep state” narrative that
imagines an entire federal law-enforcement bureaucracy united against Trump in
2016.
Moreover, these actions take place against a backdrop of
Sessions’s original, unwavering support of Donald Trump’s presidential
campaign. He was the first serious Republican to jump on the Trump Train, and
he never jumped off. He may thus be the only member of the GOP establishment
with sufficient credibility among all wings of the party to pursue Trump’s
policy agenda while also upholding the rule of law and protecting public
confidence in the administration of justice.
Sessions and Rosenstein look even better in comparison
with their immediate predecessors in the Obama Department of Justice. Contrast
Sessions’s clear recusal from the Russia investigation with Obama attorney
general Loretta Lynch’s kinda-sorta-not-really recusal from the Clinton email
investigation after her clearly improper tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, her
insistence that the FBI downplay the Hillary email investigation, and a senior
Department of Justice official’s clear admonition to Andrew McCabe to not take
any “overt steps” to pursue the Clinton Foundation investigation during the
campaign.
Let’s not forget that while Rosenstein had the foresight
to appoint a man such as Robert Mueller — a person with a sterling reputation
on both sides of the aisle — to investigate potential Russian connections to
the Trump campaign, the Obama DOJ chose a campaign donor to run the Tea
Party–targeting investigation, one of the most politically sensitive
investigations of Obama’s entire presidency.
Sadly, there are some (including, apparently, the
president of the United States) who compare and contrast the Lynch/Holder DOJ
and the Sessions DOJ and conclude that Sessions
is in the wrong, that he should be more loyal and “fight fire with fire.” This
view is dangerously misguided. Writing Monday in USA Today, former Sessions staffer Cameron Smith and former Obama
ethics czar Norman Eisen rightly laud Sessions and conclude with the key point:
“When our personal viewpoints clash, the dispassionate enforcement of our laws
steadies our republic.”
Exactly so. There are many months to go before the
relevant Russia and Cohen investigations conclude, but if past performance is a
predictor of future results, then there’s reason to have confidence that the
rule of law will prevail, and the political chips will fall where they may.
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