By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
So who’s going to protect Mr. Mueller now?
Until Wednesday, the job was being performed ably by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who assumed oversight of the Russia investigation when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March 2017.
Under Mr. Rosenstein’s leadership, the investigation Mr. Mueller took over has resulted in the felony conviction of the president’s former campaign chairman, guilty pleas from multiple other top Trump aides and associates and the indictments of dozens of Russian government operatives for interfering in the 2016 election. For more than a year, Mr. Rosenstein walked a political tightrope, guarding Mr. Mueller’s independence on the one hand while trying to appease Mr. Trump’s increasingly meddlesome demands on the other.
That task now falls to Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who on Wednesday became acting attorney general and, far more alarmingly, the man Mr. Mueller now reports to.
said in a statement on Wednesday.
The bad news is, well, pretty much everything else. Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piecearguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.
Conflicts of interest like this are what led Mr. Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. That was the ethical thing to do, even if it sent Mr. Trump into a spiral of rage.
Mr. Sessions, a veteran of the Senate, is an institutionalist at heart. “The Department of Justice,” he once said, “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” That sentiment was never going to survive long under Mr. Trump, for whom improper influence has been a central plank of governing philosophy. Ethics, not so much.
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
- Nov. 7, 2018
So who’s going to protect Mr. Mueller now?
Until Wednesday, the job was being performed ably by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who assumed oversight of the Russia investigation when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March 2017.
Under Mr. Rosenstein’s leadership, the investigation Mr. Mueller took over has resulted in the felony conviction of the president’s former campaign chairman, guilty pleas from multiple other top Trump aides and associates and the indictments of dozens of Russian government operatives for interfering in the 2016 election. For more than a year, Mr. Rosenstein walked a political tightrope, guarding Mr. Mueller’s independence on the one hand while trying to appease Mr. Trump’s increasingly meddlesome demands on the other.
That task now falls to Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who on Wednesday became acting attorney general and, far more alarmingly, the man Mr. Mueller now reports to.
said in a statement on Wednesday.
The bad news is, well, pretty much everything else. Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piecearguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.
Conflicts of interest like this are what led Mr. Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. That was the ethical thing to do, even if it sent Mr. Trump into a spiral of rage.
Mr. Sessions, a veteran of the Senate, is an institutionalist at heart. “The Department of Justice,” he once said, “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” That sentiment was never going to survive long under Mr. Trump, for whom improper influence has been a central plank of governing philosophy. Ethics, not so much.
