Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigns at request of Donald Trump, forced out less than 24 hours after midterm elections

Yeah, the immediacy of the sacking is very telling.
Colicky Trump could not stand one more hour of Sessions in office.

He already had the letter in his desk, from June onward.

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“Legal” means nothing until its been challenged and upheld by the judiciary. Sessions could have easily declined to recuse and forced someone to legally challenge him. And he could well have prevailed.

However, we still do not have to give Sessions credit for “doing the right thing,” regarding the recusal. He did it in his own self interest.

Sessions wanted to effect all his retrograde plans that he’s had ever since he was a spry young racist who was spurned for the judiciary. He was using Trump: he didn’t need to be used by Trump. By recusing, he gets to keep his hands clean of Trump affair and can get down to the business of legally harming non-white, non-male, non-conservative people.

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And here I am just hoping weed will get legalized now…

You know I think that part of the reason that Trump spends so much energy looking guilty is that he really doesn’t even have a conception of guilt and innocence, just of power and revenge.

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You know, because firing Richardson worked so well for Nixon.

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Thing is, it does not matter one whit what you or I think it implies. Everybody has an opinion, but only 9 people have opinions that matter. And a majority of the members of the supreme court seem very deferential to the powers of the Executive branch.

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"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."

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What, exactly, are we waiting for. This isn’t a poker game where you are waiting for that 3rd ace to come on the river. Or just for the round of betting to be done before pushing all in.

Either he has the evidence to charge him with something or he doesn’t. There are foot soldiers falling around him, but that doesn’t mean spears are getting past them. I understand this process takes awhile, but at this rate he will bow out of a re-election bid and go back to his gaudy gold plated mansion.

Fair point, but my feelings that will happen is slipping by every day as well.

Hey, I hope I am wrong, but the guy only has 2 years left and he’s managing to dodge accountability thus far. He just had a hissy fit at a press conference like a “triggered snowflake”.

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Jesus Christ, that is a good one.

Prosecuting high-level officials, in either the public or private sector, is a lot of legwork. You have to establish culpability in the crimes at hand, and often the only way to do that is to go through all of that person’s underlings, putting the screws to them to get the evidence you need on their boss. Mueller has been going after the foot soldiers with an eye toward getting them to flip on their dear leader, and that takes time. In cases like this, it’s also absolutely better to have a preponderance of evidence at your disposal, rather than just the barest margin you think you’ll need to make a case. Again, amassing that sort of arsenal takes time.

Mueller is also more professional than Comey when it comes to the propriety of talking about investigations, whether just before an election or in general. There are a number of people who have theorized that the investigation is wrapping up, but that Mueller didn’t want to put anything out so close to the election because it would violate Justice Department guidelines (the same guidelines that Comey violated twice by giving a press conference about the Clinton investigation and then sending a letter to Congress a week before the election saying they’d re-opened it). We’ll see if those suppositions were accurate soon enough, I guess.

Special Council investigations are also slow-moving creatures, and by many publicly-visible metrics, the Mueller investigation has moved much faster than most. This chart is from July, but it still gets the point across fairly effectively:

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You post is well reasoned. But the pedant in me has to point out that “a preponderance of evidence,” is actually lesser standard used to decide civil cases, and is a significantly lower level of proof than the “beyond reasonable doubt” used to decide criminal cases.

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I wasn’t intending to use the term in the legal sense (I just meant you’d rather have more than enough evidence than “just enough” because it’s almost certain that some of it will be contested), but fair point :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I feel like giving Sessions credit for following the law ignores that he seemed to only do so because he recognized he could use the law as a weapon to advance his racist agenda…

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So it turns out Graham was just whistling Dixie.

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See also, Devin Nunes.

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I happen to disagree, in the sense that I am never going to forfeit my sense of reality, or sanity, to anyone, and certainly not a group of 9 judges. I very much think it matters that individual citizens maintain a sense of what their rights actually are, and not what is being spoon-fed them by the current power elite who are violating those rights in spirit and in letter.

It is from this perspective that I implore people to read The Constitution (if they are American citizens), and understand that IT DOES NOT CODIFY THE NOTION THAT THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW. No matter what ANYBODY tells you. They are LYING. Use your own mind to evaluate it.

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Only the thinnest thread seems to separate this logic from that of sovereign citizens…

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You’ve got to be kidding me, trying to lump me in with neo-Nazi militia types is the best you can do? Because I assert that I am allowed to have freedom of my own mind, and interpretation of our core laws? I am not asserting that I operate outside of established systems. I am absolutely subject to them. But when the status quo is broken? I encourage changing it. Not confirming my mind to that of the brainwashed.

But we all have our karma…

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