Were you wondering if Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was still the prickly authoritarian yahoo that he's always been, now that he has gotten on the bad side of the president*? Wonder no longer, says The Washington Post.

Sessions said in the first six months of this year, the Department of Justice had received nearly as many criminal referrals involving unauthorized disclosures of classified information than it had received in the past three years combined. Though he did not say if it resulted in a criminal referral, Sessions cited in particular a recent disclosure to The Washington Post of transcripts of President Trump's conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and another with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Sessions warned the assembled media that, "This culture of leaking must stop." Of course, if it did, both government and journalism would grind to a complete halt. Sessions might as well state that he's formed a task force to keep Washington from being revoltingly hot in the summer.

That Sessions is nostalgic for the days before the Bill of Rights applied as generally as it does today is no surprise. But this particular announcement comes in the wake of the president*'s stated position that Sessions has been "weak" of chasing down leakers that help the president* look stupid in the eyes of the country and the world. So I guess you could argue that Friday's announcement was Sessions's way of showing the boss that he was a good team player and that he would like to keep his job, pretty please? After all, there is far more of the second half of the 20th Century to repeal and replace.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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