We must restore trust in the Justice Department. It doesn’t belong to any president or party.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s 2016 tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton felt off from the moment news of the rendezvous broke. With an ongoing federal inquiry into then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server, Lynch’s allegedly personal chat with the candidate’s husband in Phoenix raised legitimate questions regarding her impartiality in the matter.
Lynch did promise to accept the FBI’s prosecution recommendation — a decision later handed down by former FBI Director James Comey — but declined to recuse herself from the matter.
Regardless of the ultimate decision, the sequence of events left the Department of Justice exposed to the allegation of political cronyism in enforcing federal law. As it turns out, the incident formed a crack in the DOJ’s institutional standing.
If we’re to have confidence in the impartial enforcement of our laws, Americans must recover their trust in this department as an institution, regardless of who happens to be president.
Every individual at the DOJ has a political perspective. Like those who comprise our politically diverse nation, some staff will support the current president and others won’t. That’s an asset to the DOJ rather than a liability. Fortunately, the vast majority of DOJ employees are fully capable of separating their political leanings from the application of federal law.
Some of them, however, are not. Attorney General Jeff Sessions must do everything in his power to remove those individuals. He appears to be doing just that.
From Sessions’ appointment of U.S. Attorney John Huber to investigate FBI surveillance abuses, to Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report justifying thetermination of then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the DOJ has demonstrated the ability to police itself. Horowitz’s new report Thursday, addressing the conduct of then-FBI director Comey and other senior DOJ officials leading up to the 2016 election, parses out distinctions among insubordination, poor judgment, and impermissible political bias in a painstakingly transparent manner.
We mustn’t confuse political cronyism with differing policy perspectives. Attorneys general have always set different enforcement priorities. Sessions is more inclined than his predecessors to enforce the letter of immigration law, for instance, while Obama’s attorneys general had a more relaxed enforcement approach to cannabis laws. Those choices are quite different from taking a lenient stance toward prosecuting political allies and using federal law to punish opponents.
President Trump seems to believe that the appearance of political favoritism toward Clinton during the previous administration somehow entitles him to an attorney general willing to serve as his personal legal protector.
He isn’t.
Republicans raised hell over Lynch’s ill-advised tarmac meeting, claiming that it was evidence that the attorney general was protecting Clinton politically. Trump has been at the forefront of that charge — continually bringing it up on social media. At the same time, he has directly stated that he wouldn’t have nominated Sessions if he’d had advance notice of Session’s intention to recuse himself.
“Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself,” the president tweeted recently. “I would have quickly picked someone else.” How else should that be read other than to suggest that Trump expects political protection from his attorney general?
It’s laughable that Sessions wouldn’t recuse himself from investigations involving a presidential campaign with which he engaged extensively. If Trump anticipated legal issues related to the campaign arising, he had every opportunity to nominate someone without Sessions’ conflict. If the inquiry into campaign-related activities is indeed a “witch hunt” that Trump couldn’t have foreseen, then he has nothing to worry about in terms of which Republican appointee is overseeing the investigation.
The answer to the appearance of political cronyism under a Democratic administration can’t be Republicans endorsing the same practices in the opposite political direction. Payback might be politically satisfying, but it’s no different from the brand of “justice” we see from heavy-handed regimes in places like Russia and Venezuela.
Republican or Democratic justice falls well-short of our national standard of justice for all. Americans must reject political cronyism as a cancer to our republic — no matter who is in office.
Image credit: Mark Van Scyoc
