The attorney general has only been in the job for three months, but he’s making his presence felt at the Department of Justice with his ‘law and order’ mission

In early March, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, recused himself from the federal investigation into potential ties between Donald Trump and Russia after it was revealed he had failed to disclose at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador.

This week, Sessions helped orchestrate the firing of James Comey, the FBI director tasked with leading that same investigation.

Sessions, one of the president’s most loyal allies, was elevated to the Trump administration as a longstanding conservative ideologue tasked with overseeing the nation’s top law enforcement agency. And while Trump has sometimes appeared to be a blank canvas, baffling observers and even Republicans with his in-the-moment approach to governance and policy, Sessions has often been cast as the intellectual godfather of a rightwing agenda.

A steadfast proponent of cracking down on immigration and returning to the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s, Sessions’ transformation of the Department of Justice is only just beginning. And his role in Trump’s abrupt dismissal of Comey has cast a renewed spotlight on his growing influence.

“What we’ve learned is Sessions has no respect for the traditional independence of the department,” said Matthew Miller, the DoJ spokesman under former attorney general Eric Holder.

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“If the attorney general behaves like a partisan senator,” he told the Guardian, “the country will lose faith in his ability to lead that department in a non-political fashion.”

In the three months since he was sworn in as the 84th attorney general of the United States, Sessions has laid out his mission to restore “law and order” from ports of entry along the US-Mexico border to rooms packed with cops and federal authorities.

“For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be forewarned,” Sessions declared at the Arizona border in April. “This is a new era. This is the Trump era.”

On Friday, Sessions was flanked by leaders of the Sergeants Benevolent Association of New York City at the DoJ headquarters in Washington to mark the eve of National Police Week.

The group’s president, Ed Mullins, stood alongside Sessions before members of the press and lavished praise on the attorney general for “putting public safety ahead of parochial politics, political correctness and special interests.” He then bestowed upon Sessions honorary membership to the SBA, which, with roughly 13,000 members, is the fifth largest police union in the US.



A beaming Sessions held up the certificate, encased in a large plaque, before the cameras while vowing to “cherish” it.



“Under President Trump, this Department of Justice will have your back,” Sessions said.



“We will do all that we can to keep you safe and to promote public support for honorable officers in your dangerous work.”



The ceremony also marked a new directive by Sessions encouraging stricter mandatory minimum sentences. In a stark reversal from Obama-era policies, which sought to eliminate mandatory minimums for low-level drug offenses, Sessions ordered federal prosecutors in a two-page memo “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense”.



With the five sergeants at his side, Sessions insisted his targets were not low-level offenders.



“These are drug dealers,” he said. “We are returning to the enforcement of the law as passed by Congress – plain and simple.”

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An early and vocal surrogate of Trump’s candidacy, Sessions was the first member of the US Senate to endorse Trump’s insurgent campaign. Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, proved a champion of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration – defending even his vow to ban all Muslim immigration to the US. He was a fixture at Trump rallies, where he met chants of “Lock her up” against Hillary Clinton with a smile.



He was rewarded by being one of the first nominees to Trump’s cabinet, just 10 days after the November election. A fiery confirmation debate followed, where senators revisited his racially charged statements of the 1980s that barred Sessions from a federal judgeship.



The comments from his past included a black assistant US attorney testifying that Sessions called him “boy” on multiple occasions and what Sessions claimed was a joke about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “OK” with Klan members until he learned they smoked marijuana.

Sessions vehemently denied the charges against him three decades ago. But to civil rights advocates, they reverberate even today.

“I think he’s a racist, I think he’s a throwback, and I don’t mind saying it, any day of the week,” congresswoman Maxine Waters, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a recent interview on the Washington Post podcast Cape Up.

“I think that Jeff Sessions is very dangerous … and I think that he absolutely believes that it’s his job to keep minorities in their place,” she added.

“And so I think we have to watch him, we have to keep an eye on him, and be prepared to push back.”

His views on criminal justice reform, which in recent years looked to finally be on the cusp of a bipartisan breakthrough, have already signaled a dramatic shift at the DoJ might soon be under way.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Sessions celebrates being elected to the US Senate in 1996. Photograph: John David Mercer/AP

The Black Lives Matter movement, amplified by the high-profile killings of unarmed black men and women at the hands of law enforcement, spawned reforms under the Obama administration targeted at lowering mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses and investing in training and body cameras for police.

But in addition to his policy seeking harsher drug penalties, Sessions has also sought less oversight of state and local police by the federal government and signaled that his DoJ will scale back on suing police departments for civil rights violations.

“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Sessions told a gathering of the country’s state attorneys general in February. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that.”

Last month, Sessions also made headlines when he decried a federal court’s decision to approve a measure aimed at overhauling the embattled Baltimore Police Department.



The agreement, reached under the Obama administration, was backed by the city’s mayor and police chief and the product of a blistering Justice Department review examining police brutality and misconduct in the city after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015.



“I have grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city,” Sessions said. “Make no mistake, Baltimore is facing a violent crime crisis.”



The message received by civil rights advocates was that Sessions is skeptical of the need for comprehensive oversight of the city’s police department.



It was also indicative that the use of consent decrees, which were widely applied by the DoJ’s civil rights division under Obama as part of broader policing reforms, would be significantly reduced under Sessions’ watch.



“Jeff Sessions has criminal justice views out of the 1980s,” said Miller. “The consequence is this re-emergence of a war on drugs, largely focused on urban communities. The issue of race is bundled up in a lot of the things Sessions is doing in the department from the drug war to the crackdown on immigration.”

In the Senate, Sessions was a leading opponent of efforts to overhaul the US immigration system to help roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the country find a path to legal status.



He played a hand in thwarting an immigration compromise in 2007 under George W Bush and worked aggressively behind the scenes in 2013 to kill another bipartisan reform bill.



At the helm of the DoJ, Sessions has called on federal attorneys to consider prosecution against anyone who harbors undocumented immigrants. Although he has placed emphasis on violent cases, he also instructed his department to seek felony charges where applicable for immigrants who attempt to enter the US illegally on more than one occasion.



Sessions and the Trump administration have also shown little concern for the children and families fleeing violence in central America, focusing their words on the most violent offenders while downplaying the human stories.



“Criminal enforcement is crucial to stopping the violent transnational cartels that smuggle drugs across our borders,” Sessions said Thursday in Charleston, West Virginia, at a summit hosted by the Drug Enforcement Agency, “and the thugs and gangs who bring this poison into our communities.”



Samuel Bagenstos, a former principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DoJ’s civil rights division, said Sessions has the potential to make “fundamental changes” on issues such as immigration, civil rights and drug enforcement.



“These are areas where the Justice Department has a lot of discretion,” Bagenstos said.



“This is about questions of allocating prosecutorial resources, so a new attorney general who’s really committed to making big changes can make those big changes.”



Sessions has been becalmed, however, by the sluggish pace with which his department has hired key personnel.



It was only two weeks ago that the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Rod Rosenstein to serve as the next deputy attorney general.



The little-known US attorney, who came in with a bipartisan reputation and was seen as a potential foil to Sessions’ ideological inclinations, has found himself at the center of the president’s dramatic decision to fire Comey.



It was a memo from Rosenstein, in which he recommended Comey’s removal over his handling of the investigation into Clinton’s email server, that the White House initially cited as the basis for Trump’s action. (The president undermined his own administration’s rationale on Thursday by insisting he had planned to fire Comey “regardless of the recommendation”.)



Sessions echoed Rosenstein’s argument in a letter of his own.



“The director of the FBI must be someone who follows faithfully the rules and principles of the Department of Justice and who sets the right example for our law enforcement officials and others in the Department,” Sessions wrote. “Therefore, I must recommend that you remove James B Comey, Jr, and identify an experienced and qualified individual to lead the great men and women of the FBI.”

Sessions defended Comey’s conduct during the campaign, including the FBI director’s July press conference concluding that Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state was “extremely careless” but did not warrant criminal charges.

However, Sessions appears to have been tasked by the White House with drawing up reasons to fire Comey. Democrats cried foul at Sessions’ involvement, deeming it a violation of his recusal from the FBI’s Russia inquiry.

“This is a complete betrayal of his commitment to the public that he wouldn’t be involved in the investigation,” said Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota.

Ron Wyden of Oregon renewed his call on Sessions to step down entirely. “Sessions said he’d recuse himself from anything to do with Russia,” Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee that is investigating Russian interference in the US election, tweeted on Wednesday. “It’s clear he did not. Calling for him to resign (again).”

A spokesperson for Sessions did not return a request for comment when asked about the allegations that he had violated his recusal.



To ethics watchdogs, the answer is straightforward, despite repeated claims by the White House that Comey’s dismissal was unrelated to the Russia investigation.



“I think the Russia investigation was relevant to President Trump’s frustration with Comey,” said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W Bush administration from 2005 to 2007, “which is to say AG Sessions’ participation in that decision did violate his recusal commitment.”

Painter said it was thus “absolutely critical” to appoint an independent prosecutor to replace Comey, while adding: “I do not think the political appointees in the Justice Department should have anything to do with the Russia investigation.”

Miller said the only one appropriate response from Sessions when Trump indicated he wanted Comey gone would have been to place as much distance between himself and the president as he could.

“Every attorney general, deputy attorney general, and FBI director knows there might be a time in their tenure in office where they face their biggest test,” Miller said. “Will they stand up to the White House or will they buckle under pressure? Sessions faced that big test and he failed it.”