Jeff Sesions thinks he is big and tough enough to take on freedom of the press as a way of battling leaks.
So now Jeff Sessions, a career small-thinker now entrusted with the big job of running the Department of Justice, thinks he is big and tough enough to take on freedom of the press as a way of battling leaks he treats like a far bigger threat to our country than Russians.
To do this Sessions becomes the latest in the current government to hide behind a lie. The one Sessions tells is that he and the DOJ have to go against not just leakers, but free press as well, as a way of making this country safer. In a pig’s eye they do.
Here is just some of what Sessions said at a press conference on Friday, when we was speaking a lot more to the President than he was to you and me:
“We respect the important role that the press plays and we will give them respect, but it is not unlimited. They cannot place lives at risk with impunity. We must balance the press’ role with protecting national security and the lives of those who serve in the intelligence community and all law-abiding Americans.”
Of course, the truth here is that it’s the media these days that does far more to protect the values of this country than Sessions ever will. It was President Trump who recently referred to Sessions as being “beleaguered, ” part of Trump’s continuing anger about Sessions’ recusal from the investigation into Russian interference in our last presidential election that ultimately got Robert Mueller hired as a special counsel, and got Mueller into the president’s business, but good.
But if Sessions continues down this path, he will not just permanently shame himself. He will also shame his office, and what are supposed to be its ideals. Hysterics on the right still act as if one conversation between Sessions’ predecessor, Loretta Lynch, and Bill Clinton during the last presidential campaign was the same kind of federal offense that Sessions believes these awful leaks are.
That meeting was a mistake, absolutely. No one would dispute that. Just not a referendum on Lynch’s character, even as the prosecution of her continues in the bullhorn media.
Another truth here? Lynch, just off the career she had as U. S. attorney out of the Eastern District of New York alone, is worth 100 Sessions in the area of American justice.
What Sessions did not do on Friday, because he could not, was provide a single instance where the media, on his watch, has put this nation’s security in peril. What leakers have primarily done is annoy the man who put Sessions in his current job. Now Sessions goes after leakers because they are embarrassing this administration, sometimes on a daily basis, most recently with leaked transcripts of conversations between the president and the leaders of Australia and Mexico. Even David Axelrod, out of the Obama administration, has called leaks like that troubling. Just not against the law.
Why does Sessions, who did everything except hold up a sign on Friday saying he wanted the President to still like him, think he can get by with this? Because it’s become obvious, at this time in America, that there are enough suckers more likely to believe the media really is more of a threat in America than Putin or any of the Russians who tried to compromise the last presidential election.
Maybe Sessions is starting to think he’s a real general, at this time when retired generals like James Mattis and John Kelly try to win a new kind of war for them inside Trump’s White House.
Almost as soon as Sessions finished talking Friday, Martin Baron, now the editor of the Washington Post, came right back at him. Baron was the editor at the Boston Globe when it provided a hymn to journalism by uncovering sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic Church. The paper’s extraordinary work on that story would be celebrated by the film “Spotlight, ” which would eventually win a Best Picture Academy Award.
“Sessions talked about putting lives at risk, ” Marty Baron said. “We haven’t done that. What we’ve done is reveal the truth about what administration officials have said and done. In many instances, our factual stories have contradicted false statements they’ve made.”
No matter. Sessions now talks about “reviewing policies” for subpoenaing the press.
Maybe in somebody else’s America. President Barack Obama, by the way, hated leaks himself. But even Obama instructed one of his attorney generals, Eric Holder, to make it more difficult for reporters to be subpoenaed. If Sessions has his way the laws about that won’t just be weakened. They’ll be folded into party hats.
Sessions wanted this to be about national security on Friday, as if all leaks involve intelligence and national security. That was just the cover story. This was his own assault on the media. It wasn’t enough to hear the chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton throughout the last campaign. Now the attorney general is looking to lock up journalists.
He’s the one who wants to build a wall, around his own government. But it won’t be Mexico paying. It will be us. Leaks aren’t the danger here. He is.
