AM Teaser: Seth Abramson says "Big story re: Jeff Sessions coming later this morning"

Last year, in March 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions enlisted his subordinates to lie on his behalf that he did not know he was under federal investigation when he fired then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—an investigation initiated by McCabe and overseen by him until it was taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

By doing so, Sessions and his allies succeeded in shutting down a major controversy. If it had been made public that the attorney general had knowingly fired the deputy FBI director (and later, acting director) who’d opened and supervised that criminal investigation, the resulting scandal would have engulfed Sessions and would likely have even more seriously threatened his already tumultuous tenure as attorney general. Besides the scrutiny of the media and Congress, Sessions might have faced an inquiry by one of the Justice Department’s internal watchdog agencies, the Department’s Inspector General or Office of Professional Responsibility, as well as incurring the wrath of an already embittered president.

A government official with first-hand knowledge of the matter told me that the attorney general therefore instructed aides to make false statements in briefings to the press. The official’s account of what was at stake for Sessions is corroborated in part by a mass of evidence in the Mueller Report detailing the special counsel’s investigation of the former attorney general.

In addition to firing McCabe, Sessions, while under investigation, played a leading role in more broadly carrying out President Trump’s relentless campaign to undermine and discredit the FBI. Several leading experts on legal ethics have told me that Sessions’s simultaneous and dual roles almost certainly violated the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct and federal government conflict of interest regulations. That demonstrates both the utility of Sessions’ misstatements, and the gravity of the situation he faced.