James Comey
If Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions goes down in the widening KremlinGate scandal, it will be ironic because Sessions has played a major role in fostering an environment that allows corruption to take hold, according to a new report out of Washington, D.C.Andrew Kreig, an attorney and journalist who directs the Justice-Integrity Project (JIP), writes that Sessions long has been a "master of the dark arts of political intrigue," which include blackmail, prosecution of political enemies, and gross abuse of the justice system.
Kreig's piece focuses on Sessions' role in last week's firing of FBI director James Comey and shows that Sessions, as state attorney general and U.S. senator from Alabama, has a history of ties to such skulduggery. Title of the article is "Comey firing stems from DOJ, Sessions hidden scandals." From the article:
The Justice Department's top two officials (Sessions and Rod Rosenstein) have helped enable longstanding, deeply hidden Justice Department deceit and obstruction of justice in major cases, thereby paving the way for President Trump’s shocking firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9.
Many Americans reacted with outrage at President Trump's suggestion on May 12 that he may have secretly taped Comey while Comey sought retention as the FBI probed potential criminal Russian influence over Trump's team and the 2016 elections.
But relatively few people even in government or the media know the vast abuses that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has long enabled as a U.S. senator in Alabama beginning in 1996 and previously as a U.S. Attorney and attorney general in that state since 1981.
That's because he's a master of the dark arts of political intrigue, including dark money, political prosecutions of enemies, blackmail and other repeated abuses of the justice system — each of them tactics that are most effective when obscured by rhetoric about conservative principles, national security, family values and "rule of law." Sessions . . . was Trump's first major supporter among elected officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Kreig points to a March Guardian article, titled "Gun for hire: How Sessions used his prosecuting powers to target Democrats." From the The Guardian article, by reporters Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland:
Opponents concluded that Sessions used his federal prosecutor’s office, and the FBI agents who worked for him, as political weapons, according to more than half a dozen veterans of Mobile’s 1980s legal and political circles. Some alleged in court filings that the ambitious young Republican actually worked from a “hit list” of Democratic targets. . . .
The decades-old concerns have been revived by Donald Trump’s appointment of Sessions as US attorney general, and the mounting anxiety over his ability to remain even-handed as the nation’s most senior law enforcement official given his record of vigorous partisanship.
How partisan is Sessions? Dana Jill Simpson -- a retired lawyer, one-time GOP opposition researcher, and major figure in the Don Siegelman case -- told Kreig that Sessions is an extremist, even among some of Alabama's most "out there" conservatives. From the Kreig article:
"Jeff Sessions is a racist," Alabama opposition researcher and political activist Dana Jill Simpson told the Justice Integrity Project in an exclusive interview on May 12. "He has been on the far, far, far right even by the standards of Alabama conservatives."
Simpson is an Alabama attorney and former GOP political operative who courageously stepped forward in 2007 to describe the DOJ's frame-up on corruption charges of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, her state's leading Democrat. . . .
She has also helped this editor and other investigative reporters document many scandals. These include involvement by Sessions and his cronies in mind-boggling national and international intrigues. Among them have been secret dealings with Russia, suspicious awards of defense contracts involving tens of billions of dollars in one instance, and a sinister role in the 2007 U.S. attorney firing scandal that Simpson helped expose and document.
For almost 10 years, Legal Schnauzer has chronicled corruption in state and federal courts, in Alabama and beyond. Simpson says our courts are a wreck, in part, because of Jeff Sessions. From the JIP article:
Simpson describes Sessions as "the national ringleader of partisan abuses of the legal system, first in Alabama and then via his leadership of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where he was in a position to help appoint prosecutors, judges and other officials to accuse some people unfairly and let others off, and otherwise reward his patrons and confederates."
Just yesterday, we wrote about such a confederate, U.S. District Judge R. David Proctor, who repeatedly has ruled contrary to law in two pending federal lawsuits, regarding my unlawful arrest and incarceration in 2013-14 and the wrongful foreclosure of our home of 25 years in Birmingham.
Dana Jill Simpson
(From donsiegelman.net)
Sessions' involvement in the Comey firing, after the AG had vowed to recuse himself from all matters related to the Trump-Russia scandal, might have led him into a morass from which he cannot escape. Writes Kreig:
In sum, Comey's firing is an assault on the nation's core constitutional and other democratic values comparable if not worse than President Nixon's Watergate. However, no one can truly understand the situation, much less reform it, without appreciating the full history of the perpetrators and their institutions.
