November 9, 2018



.

Trump fires Jeff Sessions and replaces him with loyalist critical of Robert Mueller
President Donald Trump canned his attorney general on Wednesday and replaced him with a former federal prosecutor who has been openly critical of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe and will now have the power to end it. Jeff Sessions was not expected to last long after Tuesday's elections. Session's chief of staff, Matt Whitaker, has taken over as acting attorney general. Trump shared the news in a tweet, and a Justice Department spokeswoman said shortly afterward that Whitaker would have responsibility for overseeing Mueller. Sessions had recused himself from that role early on in the Trump administration, putting it in the lap of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Whitaker wrote in an essay for CNN last year that Mueller was 'dangerously close to crossing' a 'red line' by considering broadening his investigation to include a probe of the Trump family's business dealings. 'It does not take a lawyer or even a former federal prosecutor like myself to conclude that investigating Donald Trump's finances or his family's finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else,' he wrote then. 'That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.'
Matthew G. Whitaker, the attorney general’s chief of staff, jockeyed over the last two months to replace his boss by forging a close relationship with the White House, where he was seen as a reliable political ally. On Wednesday, President Trump fired Jeff Sessions and named Mr. Whitaker acting attorney general, rewarding his loyalty.

Inside the Justice Department, senior officials, including Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, have viewed Mr. Whitaker with intense suspicion. Before his current job at the Justice Department, Mr. Whitaker, a former college football tight end, was openly hostile on television and social media toward the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and was seen by department officials as a partisan and a White House spy. Now Mr. Whitaker will oversee Mr. Mueller’s investigation, prompting concerns that he could move swiftly to shut it down or hobble it, despite serious questions about his own potential conflicts in supervising it.
In a CNN interview the month before, Mr. Whitaker offered a situation in which Mr. Trump could try to hobble Mr. Mueller’s investigation behind the scenes by pressuring the Justice Department to cut the special counsel’s budget.
He said that situation was “a little more stage-crafty than the blunt instrument of firing the attorney general and trying to replace him.”