Poor Donald. He is very upset with his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Sessions refuses to do what Donald wants him to do: break the law. Or at least bend it so that the GOP can retain its hold on two House seats.
According to Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House, Donald has regretted appointing Sessions ever since the attorney general recused himself from the Russia investigation. About an interview that Donald gave to the New York Times on July 19, 2017, Woodward writes:
He said he never would have appointed Sessions if he had known he would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”
Trump was still upset three days later when he discussed his AG with Reince Priebus aboard Marine One on the way to Norfolk, Virginia. He compared Sessions to his predecessor Eric Holder:
Trump said he had always admired Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. Though he disagreed with their policies, of course, Holder had stuck with Obama no matter what came up or whatever the controversy for eight years. There had been no recusals and no dodging the political crossfire. Holder had been willing to take the hit for his president.
“Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” he said.
Aside from the fact that President Obama never colluded with a foreign power or violated the Constitution during his eight years as president, giving AG Holder no need to recuse, Donald’s rant displays his terrible anger and disappointment with the current attorney general. After all, he had always been able to get state attorneys general to go along with his plans, either through campaign donations, bullying, or threats.
In Donald’s world, every relationship is transactional. It made no sense to him, after giving Jeff Sessions the opportunity to wage his long-standing war against people of color on the federal level, that Sessions would not turn around and complete the transaction by giving Donald what he wanted most—a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Other attorneys general that he dealt with often went along with Donald’s demands in the past. Why wouldn’t Sessions stay bought?
Among his better-known dealings with attorneys general, the name that comes immediately to mind is Florida’s Pam Bondi. Current speculation is that she was on the other end of the telephone with Donald when his conversation was secretly recorded by attorney Michael (“He was a lawyer for me, one of many,” Trump said. “Didn't do big deals, did small deals”) Cohen.
Bondi has been a fan of Donald’s since at least 2013, when she received a large donation from him. Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald wrote about her presence on a 2016 conference call in which Donald ranted about the Indiana-born “Mexican” U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was hearing a case on the Trump University scam:
… an investigative AP report revealed that back in 2013, even as the attorney general’s office was receiving angry complaints from Floridians claiming they had been defrauded by Trump’s faux university and not long after her office intimated Florida might join New York’s $40 million lawsuit against Trump University, Bondi had “personally solicited” a campaign contribution from Trump.
It gets even worse. After a Bondi campaign committee received a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation, the attorney general’s office dropped its inquiry into Trump U. (In a call to the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times bureau Tuesday, Bondi protested that her office had never opened a formal investigation.)
Not only did she claim that her office had not investigated the complaints, she also claimed personal ignorance of the entire matter. As readers of Scott Maxwell at the Orlando Sentinel learned in April 2017:
In a chain of emails from late August, at least nine of Bondi’s top staffers — including her chief of staff and deputy attorney general — discussed the Trump complaints.
The string of emails actually had the subject line: "Press Inquiry from 8/29/13 - Trump."
At one point, one of Bondi’s chief investigators noted that questions about Trump University were "getting a lot of national coverage in the media."
This is the topic Bondi says she was unaware of.
Two weeks after all those emails about the complaints, Trump cut the $25,000 check to Bondi’s political committee from his charitable foundation (which was a violation of IRS rules, netting Trump a $2,500 penalty). Bondi’s political committee cashed it shortly after that. And after that, Bondi’s office decided not to purse the complaints against Trump U.
If Bondi was telling the truth, if she really did not know when she accepted the money from the subject of multiple complaints from the people she swore to defend, if she had any concept of ethical behavior, she would have returned the donation once she did learn of the issue. Of course, if she were an ethical politician she never would have accepted the money in the first place. At the same time that Bondi’s office was declining to investigate and prosecute this con run by Donald, the New York State Attorney General was suing and winning $25 million for his residents and clients.
Another attorney general who found Donald’s campaign contribution worth the price could be found in Texas. Donald’s favorite governor, Greg Abbott, was serving as Texas’ attorney general in 2010, when the Better Business Bureau rated Trump University with a ‘D’ grade, and students complained to the state about being ripped off by the school.
The office of then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, opened a civil investigation of “possibly deceptive trade practices.” Abbott’s probe was quietly dropped in 2010 when Trump University agreed to end its operations in Texas. Trump subsequently donated $35,000 to Abbott’s successful gubernatorial campaign, according to records.
Oh, but it gets worse. According to career state employee John Owens, who was the deputy director of the Consumer Protection Division of the AG’s office, the decision to drop the suit was political:
“Had [Trump] not been involved in politics to the extent he was at the time, we would have gotten approval. Had he been just some other scam artist, we would have sued him.”
More from the Dallas Morning News:
According to internal documents provided to The News about the state’s investigation into Trump University, the consumer protection division filed a formal request May 6, 2010, to sue both Trump and his namesake real estate program. Five days later, it set out settlement options to help Texas taxpayers get back the more than $2.6 million they spent on seminars and materials, plus another $2.8 million in penalties and fees.
...
In their request to Deputy Attorney General David Morales to sue, investigators said they went undercover to attend seminars and also interviewed 20 to 30 consumers by telephone.
Unlike Florida, Texas did a full-blown investigation and determined that Trump U was a fraudulent program that scammed Texans of millions of dollars. But instead of trying to recover some of that money, Abbott’s office settled for having Trump University leave the state—with its bank account intact.
And the likely corruption did not end with Abbott’s receipt of $35,000 for his gubernatorial campaign. David S. Morales appears to be getting some payback as well, after claiming that the decision to drop the investigation into Trump U was his and his alone, unlikely as that may be.
Morales has been nominated by Donald to fill a federal judicial vacancy for the Southern District of Texas at Corpus Christi. The seat has been vacant for SEVEN years, as the Republicans refused to allow President Obama to appoint a judge to fill the post. Well-liked by Ted Cruz and Jon Cornyn, he is likely to be confirmed unless Democrats take over the Senate in November. Actually, he is likely to be confirmed even if we do win the Senate, as McConnell will no doubt push a large number of nominations through before being forced to give up his gavel.
David Cay Johnson went even further back than Bondi or Abbott to demonstrate Donald’s contempt for legal processes and those who administer them. In his book, The Making of Donald Trump, he explains how Donald bullied New Jersey Attorney General John Degnan into giving him a casino owner’s license in 1981 by limiting the investigation into his background. As Johnson writes:
It was perhaps the most lucrative negotiation of Trump’s life, one that would embarrass state officials a decade later when Trump’s involvement with mobsters, mob associates, and swindlers became clearer.
...
Trump assured Degnan there was no need for a long inquiry into his conduct and business dealings; he was “clean as a whistle”—too young at age thirty-five to have become enmeshed in any sort of trouble. Trump then told him that unless the attorney general expedited approval, he would not build in Atlantic City, where he had already acquired a prime piece of land at the center of the Boardwalk. Finally, Trump hinted that his Grand Hyatt Hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan, could accommodate its own casino. Given Trump’s well-known success in convincing the City of New York to perform lucrative favors, that was a subtle but powerful threat. If New York State lawmakers authorized casinos in the Empire State, it would draw a disastrous amount of business away from Atlantic City, more than 125 miles south of Manhattan.
Degnan was about to make his own run for New Jersey governor. He knew that a Trump lawsuit, a Trump campaign for casinos in New York, or denunciations from Trump about excessive government regulation would not win him any votes. He agreed to Trump’s terms. He did not promise approval, but did promise that, if Trump cooperated, the investigation would be over within six months. Trump paid Degnan back by becoming a vocal opponent of gambling anywhere in the East except Atlantic City. Nonetheless, Degnan lost his gubernatorial bid.
Donald has never hidden his belief that money buys the loyalty of politicians. But when money doesn’t work, he has learned to use other methods. Threats and rewards have always done the trick in the past. Why, oh why, he laments, won’t they work with Sessions? From Woodward’s book:
Recusing himself made the attorney general a “traitor,” Trump said to Porter. The president made fun of his Southern accent. “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.” Trump even did a little impression of a Southern accent, mimicking how Sessions got all mixed up in his confirmation hearings, denying that he had talked to the Russian ambassador.
“How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked Porter. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. What business does he have being attorney general?”
Trump would not stop. He told Porter, “If he was going to recuse himself from this, why did he let himself be picked attorney general? That was the ultimate betrayal. How could he have done that?”
The story isn’t over yet. We don’t know if or when Sessions will cave or when he will be replaced. But currently he is denying Donald everything he had hoped from an attorney general that was bought and paid for. And right now, that is good enough.