Senator Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, is already facing fierce opposition from the establishment left, with a series of coordinated protests kicking off Tuesday to try and derail Session’s nomination. A former Department of Justice official says, however, that the real battle will begin after Sessions takes office.
On a recent episode of Radio Stranahan, election law expert and author J. Christian Adams—who served in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush—went over the immense challenges that the incoming Attorney General will face from what he calls “intransigent bureaucrats” and people talking like they’re “the smartest people in the room.”
Noting the radical push to left of the Justice Department under President Obama’s Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, Adams emphasized the importance of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, saying that it touches more parts of American’s lives than any federal agency, saying that notoriously left-leaning Civil Rights Division impacts issues like “police, voting, schools, transgender, hiring practices, education. It’s not just voting rights, it’s everything.”
Adams pointed out the reality of the math that the future AG faces for the Civil Rights Division, saying that in order to “manage a group of eight or nine hundred radicals” Jeff Sessions will have only a handful of people on his side, saying:
When I was at the Justice Department, [the Civil Rights Division] has over eight hundred employees, maybe nine hundred employees, most of whom are lawyers. We’re talking four hundred lawyers.
Do you know how many political appointees Jeff Sessions gets to put in to manage this? Like six, or seven. Six or seven people; the Assistant Attorney General, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, a couple of Deputy Assistant Attorney Generals and a couple of councillors to the Attorney General. That’s it.
Adams predicted that Sessions will face obstructions from a hostile legal team whose attitude will be “We’re the experts. I went to Harvard law, I went to Yale law, I’m the smartest person on my block, and you just don’t understand, Mr. Rube Attorney General. And, if I do lose this argument I’m going to be leaking to the Washington Post.”
While Adams says that Sessions and his small team of appointees “are gonna be spending all their time trying to roll back the fundamental transformation (or the Justice Department under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch) in a nest of vipers,” he believes Sessions is the “perfect man for the job,” saying:
I’ve said for years, the next Attorney General has got to be somebody who has experienced at the Justice Department — who knows the lexicon, the language of these super smart lawyers when they argue — the process, the bureaucracy, the procedures. He’s done that because he was the U.S. Attorney in Alabama.
Today, CNN reported that left-wing groups are “holding standing-room-only meetings to prepare for the confirmation hearings of Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general” but the Sessions battle will be “a dry run” for the confirmation war over Donald Trump’s eventual Supreme Court nominee.
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