There is something fundamentally wrong in the Department of Justice, when the Federal Attorney General refuses to follow the rule of law.
In March I wrote, “Jeff Sessions has committed the crime of perjury, and it is a criminal offense of lying under oath. A perjury charge is when someone makes a false statement after being sworn in or promising to tell the truth. This was not a mistake, it was intentional. Sessions has damaged his credibility and fundamentally impaired his ability to run the Department of Justice.”
This happened during Sessions’ confirmation hearing, and no one in the Congress or Senate had the courage to challenge his confirmation. It was much easier to sweep something wrong or broken under the rug, then confront it head on.
Now, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is raising questions about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ role in the FBI director’s firing. Democrats in the House are claiming that Sessions violated two recusal promises, and in so doing may have broken the law. Is anyone going to take action against Attorney General Sessions?
As Jeff Sessions continues to break the law, he quietly targets Blacks and people of color with harsher penalties for low level drug offenses. This Law and Order strategy never worked for Clinton or Bush, and hundreds of thousands of Black men and families were destroyed for small amounts of marijuana and drugs.
With Trump’s election, there will be no justice in the Trump-Sessions’ Department of Justice. Quietly Sessions is ending investigations into civil rights violations into police departments around the country.
“In a marked shift from the Bush administration, President Obama’s Justice Department was aggressively investigating several big urban police departments for systematic civil rights abuses such as harassment of racial minorities, false arrests, and excessive use of force,” says Justin Elliott, a reporter for ProPublica. The primary victims of police misconduct are African Americans and Latinos.
With Sessions as the head of the DOJ, there will be another shift, and police department will go back to breaking laws. This will increase wrongful convictions, false arrests, and the majority of victims will be poor, African Americans and Latinos.
All over the country, Republican governors and legislators are making it harder for Black and people of color to vote. Instead of working to increase the number of voters on the polls, the Trump-Sessions DOJ is trying to lower the number of voters on the polls. This is a deliberate disentrancement of Black voters, and can only be explained by “discriminatory intent.”
The NAACP says, “Sessions supports an old ugly history when Civil Rights were not regarded as core American values, and has no place leading our nation’s enforcement of Civil Rights and voting rights laws.”
Sen. Cory Booker says, “Sessions record indicates that we cannot count on him to support state and national effort to bring justice to the justice system. The justice system as it stands now is biased against the poor, against the mentally ill, against drug addicted, and against people of color.”
Finally Sessions is quietly increasing prosecution of undocumented immigrants and tearing families apart. The Trump-Sessions DOJ is moving in the direction of a police state, where civil rights abuses are supported by the courts, police departments, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE has more than 20,000 employees in more than 400 offices in the United States and 46 foreign countries. Many people of color think of ICE as a secret police, who at anytime can put you in jail, and deport you.
When the head of the DOJ has broken the law, there is no telling what others laws he will break to remain in office. Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are comfortable operating outside the boundaries of the law, and Blacks and people of color are the first targets.
