Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other senior Justice Department officials have blocked an internal departmental investigation into their role in implementing the Trump administration’s tough immigration policy that separated thousands of children from their parents at the border, according to interviews and government records.
Sessions did not want to be questioned by investigators for the department’s inspector general, who conducted an investigation into the family separation policy, according to a report released by the IG last Thursday setting out the findings of his investigation.
As attorney general, Sessions was one of the Trump administration’s most senior officials who devised and implemented family divorce policies. Inspector General Michael Horowitz calls Sessions and his top assistants a “driving force” behind the policy.
A second senior official of the Department of Justice, Edward C O’Callaghan, who served as Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice during the family divorce policy, also declined to answer questions from investigators.
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who now says he regrets his role in implementing the policy, has been questioned twice by investigators but has made misleading statements to them that underestimated and obscured his role.
Due to Sessions and O’Callaghan’s refusal to speak to investigators and Rosenstein misleading the IG, a complete historical account can never take place in what is considered a dark chapter in the country’s history when more than 3,000 children were not. separated from their parents. Many of his victims under the age of five, some even infants, were detained in substandard facilities alone under inhumane conditions.
The Biden government has promised to reunite families. On January 8, Biden promised that “our Department of Justice and our investigative arms will make statements about who is responsible … and whether the action is punishable or not”. If such a criminal investigation were undertaken, investigators would have powerful tools available to force evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.
A senior federal law enforcement official said that while other former justice officials refused to cooperate with various IG investigations, they could not recall another case in which an investigation was obstructed because an attorney general refused to cooperating, a second senior official of the department refused to and the deputy attorney general misled investigators.
The combination has raised questions, the official said as to whether there is a coordinated effort by 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 who did not want to cooperate. Of all the other 45 individuals the IG has tried to talk to, all agree; some sit for multiple interviews, others do so in adverse circumstances due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
O’Callaghan’s potential testimony was crucial to the investigation, not only because his own role in implementing the family divorce policy was scrutinized, but also because he was such a close adviser to the Attorney General and Rosenstein. .
O’Callaghan declined to comment.
Some investigators also concluded that Rosenstein had misled them by belittling his own role in family divorce policy.
Rosenstein told the IG that ‘he did not think he understood the concept of the [family separation] policy before it was issued; and claims that although “the AG and its staff were intimately involved” in drafting and implementing the policy, Rosenstein himself “was less likely to be involved”.
But records previously published by the Guardian and the New York Times directly contradict the allegations – and it clearly shows that Rosenstein made the policy by pushing U.S. lawyers to the U.S.-Mexico border to keep more children.
The reports further indicate that several U.S. attorneys and their assistants have had serious concerns about the inhumanity of the policy, and that it is concerned that the prosecution of much more serious crimes through the delivery of resources after the implementation of the policy will interfere. One federal prosecutor in Texas complained that because of so much energy and resources expended on the attempt, “sex offenders” were released who would otherwise remain in prison.
Rosenstein told investigators he gave prosecutors a wide discretion not to bring cases they did not want: “If anyone got the idea that they would be just like a soldier, they would prosecute every case without to the facts, it does not come from me. “
But other U.S. attorneys under the supervision of Rosenstein told the IG that they had been ordered to bring cases they did not want. One, John Bash, from the western district of Texas, wrote in a memorandum to other prosecutors that Rosenstein told him “according to the policy of the AG, we should NOT categorically reduce immigration persecution … due to the age of the child . ” Bash, who recently left the Department of Justice, further explained, “No one in this office, including me, has any discretion as to whether he would have been under the Attorney General’s zero tolerance requirement.”
Following the release of the report, Rosenstein said he now regretted his involvement in the policy: “Since I left the department, I have often asked myself what we should do differently … It was a failed policy that never had to be proposed or implemented. ”
These remarks are in sharp contrast to the previous remarks made by Rosenstein to the Inspector General to defend the policy in high thinking by saying: ‘In my opinion, the Advocate General was very clear that [there was a] the failure by the department to prosecute immigration adequately with the rule of law, and the statistics confirm this. ”
As a former attorney general, Sessions evaded questions from the department he previously stood for. In doing so, he relied on a loophole in the law that allowed former department officials to escape the consequences of collaborating with investigators once they were not in office.
Justice officers who refuse to cooperate with investigators are subject to and almost always fired from their jobs – a firing by the Attorney General. Sessions, according to regulations and long-standing norms, had the task of firing officials for the thing he did himself.
As senior justice officer, O’Callaghan privately endorsed reforms that would enable the Inspector General of the Department of Justice to enforce evidence from recalcitrant witnesses. Not to testify of himself, however, O’Callaghan acted in direct contradiction with his earlier support for a standard he himself had long supported.