When the Justice Department announced on Monday that Jeff Sessions wanted to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in an open hearing, the stated reason for the sudden embrace of transparency was that the attorney general “believes it is important for the American people to hear the truth directly from him.” It was an honorable-sounding explanation, but one that failed to acknowledge the most important fact about the testimony Sessions is set to give on Tuesday afternoon: The only person the attorney general will be thinking about is his boss, Donald Trump.
Sessions will know, or at least assume, that Trump is monitoring and assessing him the whole time he is testifying—just like he monitors and assesses his spokesman, Sean Spicer, when he gives his daily press briefings, and just like he monitored and assessed each member of his Cabinet on Monday, when they went around the room during a televised meeting and praised him effusively. (Sessions, during that meeting, said, “It’s great to be here and celebrate this group,” before babbling about the incredible support the Trump administration was receiving from “law enforcement all over America.”)
Tuesday’s hearing would likely be a less tense affair for Sessions if he were on solid ground with Trump. But not all has been well between the two men. On June 6, Spicer was asked in a press briefing whether the president still had “confidence” in Sessions. Spicer dodged the question, unwilling or unable to say “yes.” That same day, the New York Times reported that shortly before Trump left for his trip abroad, Sessions had offered him his resignation, telling the president that he needed freedom to do his job. Trump refused to accept that offer, but it still feels as if Sessions must walk a very thin line if he wants to keep his job.
The reason for Trump’s displeasure at Sessions will be on full display during Tuesday’s testimony. Multiple media outlets have reported that Trump has been nursing a grudge against his AG since early March, when Sessions unilaterally recused himself from the FBI’s Russia investigation. According to the Times, the president believes Sessions’ recusal was the instigating event for all the administration’s Russia trouble. Having “intermittently fumed for months,” the president regards Sessions’ decision as a grave mistake—one that created the conditions for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a career DOJ lawyer whose “loyalty” Trump knows he can’t count on, to appoint former FBI Director Robert Mueller III as a special counsel in charge of overseeing the Russia investigation.
Given Trump’s penchant for impulsive decisions, Sessions ought to know that the president could hit the eject button on him at any moment. Unless he’s privately decided that he’s had enough—not an impossible scenario, given that he now knows he is working for a lunatic—his performance on Tuesday might best be understood as a very public job interview, one in which Sessions will be trying to answer every question with an eye toward pleasing a man who’ll base his opinion on performance reviews handed out on cable TV.
There will be ample opportunity for Trump to be reminded of Sessions’ decision to absent himself from the Russia investigation. While the president would surely want his attorney general to say the investigation is bogus and firing Mueller would be perfectly fine, Sessions will most likely stonewall the committee every time he is asked a question that’s even tangentially related to the DOJ and Russia, telling the senators that he recused himself from the case in May. Theoretically, Sessions could use this tactic to avoid discussing almost everything the senators will want to quiz him about, including his conversations with Trump about James Comey’s firing, the contacts he had with the Russian ambassador and then failed to disclose to Congress during his confirmation hearings, and the circumstances surrounding Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Comey that occurred after Sessions left the Oval Office at Trump’s request.
Although answering any of these questions would plausibly require Sessions to talk about things Mueller has been appointed to investigate, there could also be limits to Sessions’ reticence. After all, the attorney general knows that Trump expects loyalty out of his subjects, and the former senator from Alabama could try to please him by going full loyalist. What might that look like? Theatrics aside—it’s possible Trump will be judging Sessions on his disposition and his “toughness” more than his actual answers—it could take the form of Sessions giving Trump cover for orchestrating the ouster of Mueller, an idea that started gaining traction among conservative pundits on Sunday before being floated as a trial balloon by Trump friend Chris Ruddy during a PBS NewsHour interview on Monday night.
Mueller, a dyed-in-the-wool prosecutor with an impeccable record and a sterling reputation among Republicans and Democrats, is dangerous to Trump because Trump knows he can’t control him. For this same reason, Mueller has been a reassuring backstop for those of us watching from home as Trump has said and done increasingly absurd and occasionally grotesque things over the past several weeks. (In addition to accusing James Comey of lying under oath, Trump has also played coy about whether he has audio recordings of his conversations with the former FBI director.) For all the norms Trump has violated, it has been possible to take solace in the belief that Mueller and his team of crack investigators would not let him or his minions slip away if they really did do something wrong.
This week, some of that certainty crumbled, as pundits—including Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter—started saying that Mueller should be fired. Gingrich, who had initially praised Mueller’s appointment, laid out his thinking in a pair of tweets on Monday morning:
This has the ring of an intuitive argument: Comey got his old friend Mueller appointed through a conniving press leak, and therefore Mueller’s investigation is compromised. Still, it was all just talk until Monday night, when Ruddy revealed that the president was “considering perhaps terminating the special counsel.”
While it’s entirely possible that Ruddy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, his comments nevertheless shifted the Overton window: Suddenly we had to talk seriously about the possibility that Trump would try to orchestrate Mueller’s dismissal, either by finding a way to fire him himself or by ordering one of his political appointees to do it for him. (Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith gamed out Trump’s options in a Monday night post at the Lawfare blog.) With that, it became all but inevitable that both Sessions and Rosenstein—who is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the appropriations committees of the House and Senate—would be asked what they would do if Trump moved to oust Mueller from his post.
Again, Sessions could claim that he’s recused himself from the Russia probe and therefore can’t comment on anything to do with Mueller. But if the question is phrased concretely enough—like, say, “Would you resign as attorney general if Bob Mueller were terminated as special counsel?”—then Sessions might feel compelled to tell the Senate what he knows Trump wants to hear: namely, that he will support whatever course of action the president decides to pursue.
No doubt, he’d be profoundly undermining his credibility as attorney general by doing so. But don’t put it past Sessions to stand by his man as shamelessly as Trump wants him to.
