Jeff Sessions' Last Act as Attorney General: End Efforts to Stop Police Abuses

Nearly all of us missed this one two months ago.  While enjoying a brief celebration that Jeff Sessions was leaving the Attorney General position, he was doing one last thing to significantly harm our nation.  And of course, by the next hour, Trump had done something else stupid and then we had a corrupt acting-AG and this story below never hit the mainstream news.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations, the Justice Department announced on Thursday [11/8/18].

In a major last-minute act, Mr. Sessions signed a memorandum on Wednesday before Trump fired him sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions.

Way to go Jeff, what a guy you are.

...before he left the job, the soon-to-be former attorney general....he initialed, in an illegible scrawl, a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect. Police reform had been a DOJ priority during the Obama administration, and that work played a significant role in the federal response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.

Many sources within the Department of Justice had no idea this was occurring which fits the bill for Sessions, Trump, and the GOP.

The seven-page memorandum Sessions initialed last week caught Justice Department officials by surprise, and many of them are still puzzling through what it will mean in practice. “People aren’t happy that this came out with no notice and no discussion,” one DOJ official said. “What does this really mean day-to-day? Nobody’s really sure because they weren’t included in the conversation.”

Turns out there's a ton in here that didn't initially meet the eye.  In fact, this DOJ memo is intended to STOP efforts to lower pollution.

Current and former Justice Department officials note that the new policy also applies to other areas of the department’s work, such as efforts to curb pollution. They worry its effects will be most profound and far-reaching in those realms.

The DOJ had continued to rely on consent decrees in certain areas, like environmental protection and voting rights.   Attorneys handling civil rights and environmental law cases fear last week’s memo may take these types of consent decrees off the table. 

As recently as a week before the mid-term elections, the Justice Department’s environmental unit filed a consent decree with a small town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, over cleanup of a shuttered gas plant that was leaching coal tar and other waste into the groundwater and the nearby Montreal River.

In the past year, voting rights attorneys have entered consent decrees to fix absentee-voting procedures in Wisconsin and Arizona and to improve voter roll maintenance in New York City.

“This memo will make the Justice Department much less effective in enforcing civil rights laws,” warned Jonathan M. Smith, a former official in the department’s civil rights division and the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/us/politics/sessions-limits-consent-decrees.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/why-jeff-sessions-final-act-could-have-more-impact-than-expected