The Fall of Jeff Sessions, and What Came After (Published 2020) (2024)

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For several months before he fired Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump had telegraphed that his attorney general would leave following the 2018 midterm elections. Still, Justice Department aides were surprised when the call came quite literally the next morning. At about 10 a.m., on Nov. 7, a few of them gathered in Sessions’s fifth-floor office as John Kelly, then Trump’s chief of staff, delivered the news. Sessions asked Kelly if he could at least hold off until the end of the week. Kelly said he could not; it was either resign now, or await a presidential tweet. So Sessions’s communications director pulled out her phone and tapped out a statement from the notes she prepared the day before, just in case. “Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. President,” it concluded. Two aides grabbed it off the printer and carried it to the West Wing.

The previous three years had transpired for Jeff Sessions like a malarial dream. There he was in early 2016, beaming from the campaign stage in the Huntsville, Ala., suburb of Madison before a crowd of more than 10,000, Trump’s prized opening act, extolling the inception of a “movement.” There he was one year later in his dream job at the Justice Department, one gear shy of skipping as he zagged through the corridors of the West Wing, greeting old campaign and congressional acquaintances as they settled into their quarters, “like a kid in a candy store,” one former White House official recalled. And there he was, just 22 days after his confirmation, issuing the terse statement recusing himself from any investigation his department might undertake into charges that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election — the action that would send the dream spiraling into still weirder territory.

It was in his hour of darkness, after his firing, that Sessions received a call from Trent Lott. The former Republican senator from Mississippi knew something about unceremonious downfalls, his tenure as Senate majority leader cut short in 2002 following a toast to the past presidential aspirations of one Strom Thurmond. (“If the rest of the country” had voted for Thurmond in 1948, when he ran on the pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket, Lott said, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”) But Lott had rebounded with ease, slinking back into Senate leadership before exiting politics on his own terms and settling into the life of a lobbyist. He had since acted as a kind of life coach for Senate friends — Kit Bond of Missouri, the late Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — who were considering what might come after public service, and he suggested Sessions come by his office for a talk.