Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!
The above is a tweet that Donald John “Smart Person” Trump Sr. fired off this morning.
He continues to do the seemingly impossible. The president is making patently unsympathetic characters, um, sympathetic.
Trump is undermining the attorney general. He seems to want the AG to quit. My guess — along with many others — is that the president cannot get past Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the “Russia thing,” because he couldn’t be an impartial investigator into whether the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russians who meddled in our 2016 presidential election.
For the record, while I am no fan of the attorney general, he did precisely the right thing in recusing himself. He was a key campaign adviser and served in a senior position in the Trump transition to the presidency. He had no business investigating the Russia meddling issue and he acted properly in backing away.
At issue is Sessions’s decision to use inspector general lawyers to probe allegations of bias in the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to examine the Trump campaign.
According to The Hill: The president said the Justice Department’s inspector general is ill-equipped to probe allegations that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was improperly used to monitor members of his transition team.
Trump wants AG lawyers to look into it and is blasting the attorney general for using the IG legal team.
And, of course, he has to mention that the IG is an appointee of former President Barack Obama, continuing the current president’s fixation with leveling criticism of All Things Obama.
The disgrace doesn’t involve the attorney general’s decision to use the inspector general’s team. The disgrace continues to be the president’s unheard of undermining of the AG.