Also with us, Elizabeth Holtzman, former U.S. congresswoman from New York who served on the Watergate committee -- she was its youngest member -- the committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon. Her new book is out this Monday. It's titled The Case for Impeaching Trump.
Welcome, both, to Democracy Now! David Cole, let's begin with you. Why don't you lay out what happened yesterday? It was about an hour after Trump held his news conference where he called the midterm elections a great success, attacked the press, attacked Republicans who hadn't supported him fully. People asked about the Mueller probe. He sort of wove around it. And then the announcement came that Sessions, the attorney general, had been asked for his resignation, and he was out.
DAVID COLE: Right. And this is something that Trump has been threatening, repeatedly, over the course of his term, but he waited until the midterms happened, presumably concerned that if he did it beforehand, it would redound to his detriment. And then also seeing that the House is now going to be in the control of the Democrats and that he is more vulnerable with respect to investigations into his personal misconduct, he demanded Sessions' resignation.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I mean, as you point out in The New York Review of Bookspiece, it's especially surprising because, on the one hand, Sessions was one of Trump's earliest and most loyal supporters, so it was really, in effect, the Russia probe and Sessions recusing himself that is responsible for the decision that Trump took.
DAVID COLE: Absolutely. I mean, Sessions was about as loyal to Trump as you could find anybody. He was the first senator to back Trump. He defended Trump throughout the campaign, even when the Access Hollywood tape came out. He said he didn't think what Trump bragged he could do to women constituted sexual assault.
And then, as attorney general, he implemented every one of Trump's conservative agendas -- targeting immigrants, family separation, increasing criminal justice enforcement, increasing incarceration, reviving the war on drugs, eliminating protections for LGBTQ individuals, supporting voter suppression, ending inquiries into policing abuse in cities across the country. So he was -- he is and was, I think, the most effective Cabinet member for Donald Trump.
The one thing he didn't do for Donald Trump was to violate the rules of ethics and oversee an investigation in which he himself was implicated, because he was part of the Trump campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, his aide, his aide when he was a senator, Stephen Miller, who went on to become Trump's chief -- one of his chief advisers and architect of anti-immigrant policies, Miller came from --
DAVID COLE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: -- from Sessions. So, what was it that -- what was it that he did? What was the reason he recused himself?
DAVID COLE: The reason he recused himself was because he -- this is an investigation of Russia's alleged interference in our election and the Trump campaign's potential collusion with that investigation [sic]. Sessions was a member of that campaign. He was a leading senior member of that campaign. He also lied about his involvement with Russians in the hearings for his confirmation.
So, when this investigation launched, he went, as you are supposed to do as attorney general -- he went to the ethics adviser in the Justice Department and said, "Here's the situation. We've got an investigation into the Trump campaign's possible collusion with the Russians. I was part of the Trump campaign. Can I oversee that investigation?" And, you know, the answer to that is pretty obvious: no. That's the answer he got.
And then he followed the ethics adviser's advice. He followed the law in that situation. The problem was, he wasn't willing to put his personal loyalty to the president over his obligation to follow the law. And that's essentially why he got fired.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let's go to his replacement, Sessions' replacement, Matthew Whitaker, and what we know about him. In an opinion piece for CNN last year, Whitaker argued that special counsel Robert Mueller was, quote, "going too far" in his investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
He wrote, quote, "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. That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel. ... The Trump Organization's business dealings are plainly not within the scope of the investigation, nor should they be," Whitaker wrote.
He goes on to say that if Mueller continues along the same lines, there will be reason to conclude that his investigation was, quote, "a mere witch hunt." And during a 2017 radio interview, Whitaker dismissed the possibility of the president being charged with obstruction of justice out of the Mueller investigation.
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