Ousted Obama U.S. Attorneys Had To Go
Why the outrage surrounding this president doing what every recent president has done?
Goodbye, prosecutors! (photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The media exploded late Friday night with the unexplosive news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had asked for the resignations of the remaining 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys.
As the left defaulted to apoplectic outrage, reasonable minds recognized the uncontroversial nature of Sessions’s action. Sessions – like many attorneys general before him – asked for the previous administration’s attorneys to tender their resignations. These political appointees do, after all, serve at the pleasure and sole discretion of the president.
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For some perspective, President Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, asked for the resignations of 93 of the 94 acting U.S. attorneys. Ironically, this included Attorney General Jeff Sessions himself, who received a letter stating, “The President has asked me to request that United States Attorneys immediately submit letters of resignation… .”
Like President Clinton, President Ronald Reagan fired 89 of the previous administration’s serving U.S. attorneys. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama followed suit, replacing many U.S. attorneys at varying rates of speed. The practice is commonplace.
So why the outrage surrounding this president doing what every recent president has done?
Always in search of a scandal, the left attempted to differentiate the Trump administration’s replacing of U.S. attorneys by focusing on the immediacy of the resignation requests. The left lamented that the resignation requests came as a “surprise” to many attorneys.
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Given precedent, the requests should have come as no surprise, and Governor Chris Christie perhaps provided the best response to the complaining: “They received notice that they were leaving office. That notice was given to them by the people of the country on November 8, when they elected a Republican president.”
The left, nevertheless, continued its chorus of cataclysm, pointing to the aberrational and worrisome nature of the resignation requests. But, in truth, what is aberrational and worrisome is not the speed with which the attorneys were let go but the unprecedented leaking and subversive tactics plaguing the Trump White House.
Now, to be clear, I am not arguing that the 46 attorneys fired are in any way contributors to the White House leaks. I am noting, instead, the understandable reasoning for the Trump administration wanting to purge the executive branch of Obama Administration political appointees entirely.
This Trump White House has been beset by leaks and subversion. Almost daily, leakers are giving classified information to the press – a felony act. One of these felonious leaks concerned the content of a private conservation between the Russian ambassador and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, leading to the resignation of the latter. Additionally, there have been multiple serious leaks about the FBI’s investigation into Russian hacking and leaks about the president’s private evening habits and rituals.
In addition to leaks, we have seen outright efforts to set back the Trump agenda. One came from the Justice Department itself, when then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates instructed the Department of Justice to defy President Trump’s first immigration executive order.
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Rather than resign or express her views privately to the president, Sally Yates opted to publicly defy the executive. As the National Review editors succinctly explained:
If her opposition to the president’s policy was as deeply held as she says, her choice was clear: enforce the president’s policy or quit. Instead, she chose insubordination: Knowing she would be out the moment Senator Sessions is confirmed, she announced on Monday night that the Justice Department would not enforce the president’s order. She did not issue this statement on the grounds that the order is illegal.
The leaking and defiance from Obama administration holdouts is not just wrong, it is crippling. In order to act effectively on behalf of the American people, the Trump administration must clean house, stop the leaking, stop the subversion, and continue working for the American citizen.
This means letting go of the past – including 46 Obama-appointed attorneys – and turning to the future, new U.S. attorneys whose enforcement priorities are in line with those of the president.
Kayleigh McEnany is a CNN political commentator. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and she also studied politics at Oxford University. In addition to writing a column for Above the Law, she is a contributor for The Hill. She can be found on Twitter at @KayleighMcEnany.
