Why Jeff Sessions' Final Act Could Have More Impact Than Expected
By Ian MacDougall ProPublica
November 13, 2018 1:40 pm
Just before he left, the departing attorney-general adopted a policy to limit the Justice Department’s ability to oversee abusive police departments. That same policy could also hamper the department’s role in environmental, voting-rights, and other cases.
Jeff Sessions hides emotion poorly — his face is reflexively expressive — and last Wednesday night, it betrayed a mixed set of sentiments as he stepped out of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in downtown Washington. He had the stunned appearance of a hostage emerging out of an underground prison for the first time in months. But for a moment, in the news-camera glare, another look flashed across his face: the impish grin of a man who knows he’d managed to leave a little surprise behind.
Earlier that day, Sessions had resigned as the head of the Justice Department at the request of President Donald Trump. But before he left the job, the soon-to-be former attorney general had some last-minute business to attend to. With a black-ink pen, he initialed, in an illegible scrawl, a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect. Police reform had been a DOJ priority during the Obama administration, and that work played a significant role in the federal response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.
Sessions, however, had long opposed the federal police oversight and the consent decrees — long-term reform plans supervised and enforced by a federal judge — that defined DOJ’s approach during the Obama years. In his view, they undermine law enforcement and amount to improper federal meddling in state and local affairs. (This summer, I documented the human consequences of the dramatic extent to which Sessions and his deputies had scaled back federal police oversight.)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sessions-limit-doj-oversight-police-departments-impact
I want this asshole, to be brought back into the new Congress, at Oversight Committee and answer some questions, and then over at the Judicial Committee, and then Intelligence Committee ..................and then to be shown his tape on how he lied in front of the public and the committee and charged with perjury and every action he submitted to be implemented be annulled.........................
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