Sen. Coons: “This must have been a knowing refusal by Sean Spicer to confirm that the attorney general still has the president’s confidence”
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, yesterday joined Wolf Blitzer on CNN to discuss Attorney General Sessions, tomorrow’s testimony from former FBI Director James Comey, and recent developments in Qatar and the Middle East.
“Well, I think this is one of the ways that President Trump signals he’s reconsidering his support for senior members of his administration. This must have been a knowing refusal by Sean Spicer to confirm that the attorney general still has the president’s confidence,” said Senator Coons. “As for me, I’ve really had concerns that Attorney General Sessions hasn’t respected the scope of his recusal. He was directly involved in the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey, and I have asked along with several other Democrats have asked the inspector general of the Department of Justice to review whether or not the attorney general has complied with his own recusal.”
Full audio and video available here.
Excerpts from interview:
Senator Coons on Sessions: Well, I think this is one of the ways that President Trump signals he’s reconsidering his support for senior members of his administration. This must have been a knowing refusal by Sean Spicer to confirm that the attorney general still has the president’s confidence. As for me, I’ve really had concerns that Attorney General Sessions hasn’t respected the scope of his recusal. He was directly involved in the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey, and I have asked along with several other Democrats have asked the inspector general of the Department of Justice to review whether or not the attorney general has complied with his own recusal.
More on Sessions: Well, I would sure hate to be the lawyer who is going to defend President Trump’s Muslim travel ban in front of the Supreme Court after that string of tweets he let off because they significantly undermined his case. It also suggests, it is directly criticizing the Department of Justice, so the only conclusion I could draw from the president’s tweets is that his frustration is mounting with the attorney general and that Attorney General Sessions ought to be considering whether or not his tenure with this administration is going to be strong or long.
Senator Coons on the president’s travel ban: Well, certainly not in a way that so directly undermines the president’s own case in front of the Supreme Court. As you know, several courts have invalidated the so-called Muslim ban or the travel ban. They have linked it to President Trump’s statements as a candidate that suggested what had he was really after was a religiously-motivated ban, and by firing off these tweets that suggest he preferred the less politically correct first Muslim ban, President Trump has weakened and undermined his case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senator Coons on Comey’s testimony: Well, there are two important things that I’m looking for week out of the testimony from former FBI director Comey. First, is just a reconfirmation in his view that Russia really did interfere in our 2016 election, that’s well and widely known here on Capitol Hill, but for a lot of Americans who have been busy going about their lives and who may tune into this hearing this week, I think that’s helpful to have it reconfirmed that the intelligence community, including the FBI, all concluded that Russia at Putin’s direction intentionally interfered in our election. More important is the potentially explosive testimony by the FBI director that President Trump directly asked him to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, to back off the investigation into his national security advisor or to slow down or back off the ongoing investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian senior officials. That’s a really striking allegation, and to have the former FBI director, a seasoned senior lawyer and law enforcement official testify to those actions would have significant consequences.
More on Comey: That’s right. I do not expect the former FBI director to say in so many words this constitutes obstruction of justice. As a law enforcement professional, he knows that that conclusion is left to others, but I do expect he will testify as to whether President Trump did or did not inappropriately lean on him to either pledge loyalty to Trump personally or to back off the investigation. I’ll remind you that allegations have been made that Trump also inappropriately pressured the director of national intelligence and the head of the NSA, both of whom will testify tomorrow, in the same sort of way to back off of the investigation or to make public statements that there’s no evidence of collusion.
Senator Coons on additional testimonies in the coming days: I expect the same thing, and the suggestion by the White House that Jim Comey, the former FBI director, is only going to be able to testify on Thursday because they are not asserting executive privilege, frankly doesn’t pass the laugh test. The reason there isn’t an executive privilege to assert here is in part because President Trump himself chose to talk about his private conversations with the former FBI director. If there had been any executive privilege here, it was almost certainly waived by the president’s own actions.
Senator Coons on President Trump’s Qatar decision: Well, frankly, it’s a very troubling thing for the president to be diving in on Twitter to such a complicated and fast-moving issue as our Gulf allies cutting off all relations with Qatar. My understanding is that today the Defense Department has also issued a statement thanking Qatar for their long-standing partnership and the fact that they host one of our largest bases in the region, an air base that has 11,000 U.S. and coalition personnel on it from which sorties are being flown against ISIS in the ongoing military campaign. I think a more appropriate stance for the president to have taken would be that he urged strong action against organizations like Hamas which Qatar has long supported, but to not endorse the severing of relations between Saudi Arabia and a number of other Gulf partiers with Qatar, which is a strong and decisive step that will unsettle relations in the Persian Gulf.
More on Qatar: Qatar has been engaging for a while in funding organizations, most importantly Hamas, but others associated with Al-Nusra, and they have been supporting journalism outlets that really gets under the saddle of a lot of their Persian Gulf allies and that arguably has supported some more extreme views within the Gulf. So yes, there are reasons to criticize Qatar. They haven’t taken decisive steps to cut off funding. The Saudis have taken a very strong step here, but it seems once again to show there are internal divisions within the administration between what’s been said by the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the president’s tweets. To me, this suggests we continue to have a challenge. Out of roughly 500 senior positions in the Defense Department and other important administration agencies, there are more than 450 that are vacant and where there hasn’t been a nominee advanced by the administration. We don’t have a nominee to be the ambassador to the United Kingdom at a time when they face several terrorist threats. There’s no nominee to be the new FBI director. There’s no nominee from this president to run the TSA, which helps keep our airways safe, so frankly I would hope the president would put the phone down, stop tweeting at all hours of the day and night, and instead move forward with some of these important vacant positions where there isn’t yet a nominee from this administration.
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