Jeff Sessions’ Conduct Has Been Beyond Reproach

This week in the Daily Caller, RNLA Vice President for Election Education David Warrington submitted an op-ed reviewing this week's Senate hearing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The article praises his testimony and offers a comparison to the former Obama Administration:

[Attorney General] Sessions stood his ground and answered every question asked regardless of how ridiculous the question . . . The only questions he refused to answer were ones pertaining to private conversations he had with the President.  In refusing to detail those conversations, he acted properly. . . Sessions’ refusal to answer on the basis that President Trump may wish to assert executive privilege over the conversation in question, conforms with longstanding practice at the Department of Justice, as well as every other department or agency of the executive branch.  Democrats were aghast at this, and Senator Martin Heinrich (NM) even accused him of obstructing a congressional investigation.  Yet legal privileges, like the attorney-client privilege, marital privilege, and executive privilege, are important protections for the rule of law, not an obstruction of the process. . .

Furthermore, as it is the President who holds the privilege, neither Sessions nor any other executive branch official, has the authority to waive that privilege.  Every President, including Obama, understood this . . . Democrats on the Committee, and their allies, must have forgotten that for eight years during the Obama administration, they championed the independence of the executive branch, executive privilege, the confidentiality of executive branch communications, and the power of the executive branch to resist congressional investigations. . . The Obama administration broadly resisted congressional investigations into serious crimes and misdeeds for which there was actual evidence (unlike the assertion of Trump’s collusion with Russia).

Mr. Warrington went on to point out that President Obama’s DOJ did not turn over emails in the IRS investigation on targeting Tea Party organizations, invoked executive privilege on Operation Fast and Furious, and shielded Executive staff from participating in congressional investigations or blatantly ignored the calls of Congress. The article closed on this note:

Attorney General Sessions’ conduct has been above reproach, and the inquiries about him should be laid to rest, but Democrat Senators and the media continue “resisting” President Trump through false attacks on Sessions and others close to Trump.  This not only damages the public discourse and undermines our system of representative government but, as Sessions pointed out during the hearing, it distracts the DOJ from legitimate problems facing the nation, such as the opioid epidemic and terrorism.  Perhaps that is the Democrats’ true goal: if successful in damaging Sessions, they can prevent DOJ from carrying out its mission and thereby harm President Trump and Republicans in 2018 and 2020. . . The Democrats will continue to trade in detestable lies and secret innuendo in their attempt to effectuate the coup they seek in order to achieve the result they did not get at the ballot box. . . What today’s hearing demonstrated beyond any doubt is that Attorney General Sessions is an ethical man who has served his country honorably for many years.

This article was published as part of the Republican National Lawyers Association's regular weekly Op-Ed with the Daily Caller. To read Mr. Warrington's other article about Attorney General Sessions, please click here. We will bring you a summary of our next article next week.