Jeff Sessions

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Jeff Sessions served as U.S. Attorney General from February 2017 until his forced resignation in November 2018. As the first sitting senator to endorse Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, he was an early institutional legitimizer of the movement and a central architect of the administration’s immigration hardline, including the family-separation policy.

As Attorney General, Sessions moved quickly to reverse Obama-era criminal-justice policy. In February 2017 he rescinded the Justice Department’s directive to phase out the federal use of private prisons — a memo whose effect was immediate and measurable: private-prison stocks rose sharply on the reversal, and operators such as the GEO Group expanded under the administration’s immigration-detention buildout (Bloomberg, Feb. 23, 2017; NPR, Feb. 23, 2017).

In March 2017, Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, a step required under Justice Department ethics rules given his role in the Trump campaign (NPR, March 2, 2017). The recusal — and the appointment of a special counsel that followed — enraged Trump, who humiliated Sessions publicly and repeatedly over it. The episode is documented in the Mueller Report (Vol. II) and in former FBI Director James Comey’s contemporaneous memos and Senate testimony. Trump ultimately forced Sessions out in November 2018, the day after the midterm elections.

Sessions’s arc illustrates a recurring dynamic of the period: early enablers who lend a movement institutional legitimacy are discarded once their usefulness is exhausted or their residual institutional instincts — here, adherence to a recusal rule — produce inconvenient results.

Sources

• NPR, “Attorney General Jeff Sessions Recuses Himself From Russia Investigations,” March 2, 2017 — https://www.npr.org/2017/03/02/518197125/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-recuses-himself-from-russia-investigations
• Bloomberg, “Justice Department Reverses Obama Private Prison Order,” Feb. 23, 2017 — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/obama-private-prison-order-reversed-by-trump-administration
• NPR, “Private Prison Stocks Soar Under Trump Administration,” Feb. 23, 2017 — https://www.npr.org/2017/02/23/516916688/private-prison-stocks-soar-under-trump-administration
• Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (Mueller Report), Vol. II — https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
• Statement for the Record — James B. Comey, former Director of the FBI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) — https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf