Jeff Sessions’ name hasn’t tended to come up much in the endless stories about power struggles between Donald Trump’s top advisers—are Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner fighting? Are Reince Priebus’ days numbered?—but maybe it should. Though Sessions’ big moment in the spotlight between becoming attorney general and this week’s firing of James Comey was when he enraged Trump by recusing himself from Russia-related investigations, Politico’s Eliana Johnson reports that Sessions is ascendant. “I feel like he’s first among equals,” said one Department of Justice official of Sessions’ role in the Trump White House.
Sessions’ influence is extended by his former staffers who are now ensconced in the Trump regime:
That network includes his longtime communications director, Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president, and his former chief of staff Rick Dearborn, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs. Cliff Sims, a longtime friend and adviser, is a strategic communications aide to the president.
Outside the White House, Gene Hamilton, who served as Sessions’ general counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is now a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human services. From that perch, he was one of just a handful of federal employees who — along with Miller and Bannon — helped to push through the president’s initial travel ban, which was struck down in federal court.
Sessions’ tenure has not been marred by the sort of infighting over personnel that has stymied other presidential advisers. In fact, senior Justice Department officials describe a relatively seamless relationship with the White House counsel’s office — and with the president himself. While other Cabinet secretaries, most notably Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have struggled to staff their departments due to disagreements with senior White House aides and the Office of Presidential Personnel, a senior Justice Department official said Sessions has essentially had free rein when it comes to hiring.
And Sessions is reportedly “prevailing over Kushner, with whom he has clashed on criminal justice reform, when it comes to making law enforcement a priority for the administration.”
Now that he’s helped Trump get rid of that meddlesome priest the FBI director who was investigating him, who knows how influential Sessions could become.