538 op ed "What Jeff Sessions's Resignation Could Mean For The Mueller Investigation"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-jeff-sessionss-resignation-could-mean-for-the-mueller-investigation/

And here it is, the first big Trump Cabinet shakeup of the post-midterms season: Jeff Sessions just resigned from his job as attorney general. And it appears the decision wasn’t voluntary. In his letter of resignation, Sessions wrote that President Trump had asked him to step down. But Sessions’s departure comes as no surprise to political observers. Trump has long been angry with his attorney general, once one of his closest supporters. Arguably, the bad blood started between the two once Sessions recused himself from any investigation involving the 2016 campaign, which turned out to include special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But now that Sessions is actually leaving, the fate of Mueller’s probe looks a lot more uncertain.

One of the most immediate consequences of Sessions’s resignation is that his replacement, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, now replaces Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the supervisor of Mueller’s probe. This is potentially a big deal for Mueller’s investigation because had Sessions been fired, it wouldn’t have been clear whether Trump could replace him with someone like Whitaker, who until today was Sessions’s chief of staff, which is not a Senate-confirmed position or high enough in the Justice Department hierarchy.

As supervisor, Rosenstein has overseen Mueller since the beginning of the investigation, and he has defended Mueller’s work at crucial moments, such as when Republicans in Congress questioned whether the probe is biased. After rumors spread in September that he was about to be fired, he reiterated that he thought the investigation was “appropriate and independent.” He has also pushed back on congressional requests for documents related to the investigation, even under significant duress.

Whitaker, on the other hand, appears to have very different views about the proper scope of Mueller’s investigation. In an op-ed for CNN last year, Whitaker wrote that Mueller was overstepping his bounds by looking into financial records related to the president’s businesses and argued that Rosenstein should rein in the special counsel. And in a TV appearance last year, Whitaker said the attorney general could decrease the special counsel’s budget “so low that his investigation grinds almost to a halt.”


snip - read the rest at the link

[Tiggeroshii]

1. Gonna be interesting to see how the House responds to this...

...next year :

[beachbum bob]

2. Trump doesn't nderstand, the house judiciary committee can hire mueller and

bring his team over and pursue articles of impeachment. The senate doesn't "choose to run the impeachment trial" once the house issues articles.

[C_U_L8R]

3. This was a firing, not a resignation.

Even the carefully worded 'resignation letter' can't say it straight. Whitaker should not be eligible for the AG spot without Senate confirmation.