November 7, 2018

Jeff Sessions’ Long National Nightmare Is Finally Over

Chip Somodevilla/CNP via ZUMA

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I just woke up from one of my dex-induced 3-hour naps to learn that this has been a bad week for people named Sessions. The first to go was Rep. Pete Sessions, son of former FBI director William Sessions, and today it was the turn of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former senator from the great state of Alabama. Both are Eagle Scouts.

So Jeff Sessions has finally been fired. For the nonce, he has been replaced by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. It doesn’t appear that Whitaker was ever an Eagle Scout, but he did play in the Rose Bowl for Iowa. In any case, this will all change whenever Trump gets around to nominating a permanent replacement—unless Trump decides to stick with Whitaker. Whoever it is, I think one thing we can be sure of is that it won’t be someone who will recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

By the way, the Washington Post reported on this three weeks ago:

President Trump talked recently with Jeff Sessions’s own chief of staff about replacing Sessions as attorney general, according to people briefed on the conversation, signaling that the president remains keenly interested in ousting his top law enforcement official….On a long list of indignities that Sessions has endured from his boss, Trump’s discussing replacing him with his own top aide stands out.

I imagine this was fake news at the time, but whaddayaknow? It turned out to be real news after all. Trump just didn’t want to announce it before the election, when it might have pissed off some of his supporters, who were big Jeff Sessions fans.

I wonder who else Trump is itching to fire? Rod Rosenstein maybe? Does anybody have a pool going?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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