Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other senior justice department officials have prevented an internal departmental investigation into his role in implementing the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy, which separated thousands of children from their parents at the border, according to government interviews and records.
The sessions declined to be interviewed by investigators from the department’s inspector general, who conducted an inquiry into the family’s separation policy, according to a report released last Thursday by the IG detailing the results of his inquiry.
As Attorney General, Sessions was one of the most senior officials of the Trump administration who planned and implemented the family separation policy. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, called Sessions and his top advisers the “driving force” behind the policy.
A second senior justice department official, Edward C O’Callaghan, who served as the deputy chief attorney general for the justice department during the family separation policy, also refused to answer investigators’ questions, according to the report.
Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who now says he regrets his role in implementing the policy, was interviewed twice by investigators but made misleading statements that mitigated and obscured his role.
As a result of Sessions and O’Callaghan’s refusal to speak to investigators, and Rosenstein’s misleading IG, complete historical accounting may never occur in what is perceived as a dark chapter in the country’s history, when more than 3,000 children were separated from their parents. Many of its victims under the age of five, some even children, were kept alone in precarious facilities under inhumane conditions.
The Biden government has promised to bring families together. On January 8, Biden promised that “our justice department and our investigative bodies will make judgments about who is responsible … and whether the conduct is criminal or not.” If such a criminal investigation were carried out, investigators would have powerful tools available to compel the testimony of recalcitrant witnesses.
A senior federal law official said that while other former bailiffs have refused to cooperate with several other IG investigations, they have not remembered another instance in which an investigation was stopped because an attorney general refused to cooperate. , a second senior department official refused, too, and the deputy attorney general deceived investigators.
That combination raised questions, the official said, about whether there was a coordinated effort from the highest levels of the justice department to sabotage the investigation.
Sessions and O’Callaghan were the only two government officials asked to provide information that they refused to cooperate with. Of all the other 45 individuals with whom the IG sought to speak, all agreed; some sitting for various interviews, others doing so in adverse circumstances because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
O’Callaghan’s potential testimony was crucial to the investigation, not only because his own role in implementing the family separation policy was under scrutiny, but also because he was a close advisor to the attorney general and Rosenstein.
O’Callaghan declined to comment.
Some investigators also concluded that Rosenstein deceived them by minimizing their own role in the family separation policy.
Rosenstein told IG that “he didn’t think he saw the draft of the [family separation] policy before being issued; and stated that, although “GA and his team were closely involved” in the design and implementation of the policy, Rosenstein himself “was less likely to have been involved”.
But the records previously published by the Guardian and the New York Times directly contradict these claims – clearly demonstrating that Rosenstein intensified the policy by pressing US prosecutors on the United States’ border with Mexico to detain more children.
The records also indicate that several US prosecutors and their advisers had serious reservations about the inhumanity of the policy and concerns that, by diverting resources to the implementation of the policy, it would interfere in the judgment of much more serious crimes. A federal prosecutor in Texas complained that, as a result of so much energy and resources being devoted to the effort, “sex offenders were freed” who otherwise would have remained in prison.
Rosenstein told investigators that he gave prosecutors ample freedom not to bring cases that they did not want: “If anyone had the idea that they should be like a soldier, suing all cases without taking into account the facts, it didn’t happen to me . “
But other US prosecutors overseen by Rosenstein told the IG that they were forced to open cases they didn’t want. One of them, John Bash, from the western district of Texas, wrote in a memo to other prosecutors that Rosenstein told him “according to AG policy, we should NOT categorically refuse immigration processes … because of the child’s age “. Bash, who recently left the justice department, further explained: “Nobody]in this office, including me, had any decision-making power over whether we would accept if we were under the attorney general’s zero tolerance requirement.”
After the report was released, Rosenstein said he now regretted his involvement in the policy: “Since I left the department, I often wondered what we should have done differently … It was a failed policy that should never have been proposed or implemented . “
These comments are in stark contrast to Rosenstein’s previous comments made to the inspector general, defending the policy in noble terms, saying: “The attorney general was very clear in his opinion that [there was a] the department’s failure to sufficiently process immigration under the rule of law, and statistics confirm that. “
As a former attorney general, Sessions avoided questions from the same department he headed. To do this, he relied on a loophole in the law that allowed former department employees to escape any consequences of cooperating with investigators when they were out of office.
Bailiffs who refuse to cooperate with investigators, while on their job, are subject to and are almost always fired from their jobs – a dismissal carried out by the attorney general. So Sessions, by old rules and regulations, was tasked with firing employees for exactly what he did.
As a senior justice officer, O’Callaghan in particular endorsed reforms that would have allowed the justice department’s inspector general to compel the testimony of recalcitrant witnesses. By not witnessing himself, however, O’Callaghan was acting in direct contradiction to his earlier support for a standard he had long supported.