Turns out Jeff Sessions, the stunningly racist former attorney general who ran the Justice Department for 21 months of the Trump Administration, was also extremely racist just in his general everyday office behavior. Wow! Who woulda guessed!
Here’s an anecdote from The Threat, a new book by former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, as reported by the Washington Post:
The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”
[...]
The attorney general’s views on race and religion are described as reprehensible.
Sessions “believed that Islam — inherently — advocated extremism” and ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. “Where’s he from?” was his first question about a suspect. The next: “Where are his parents from?”
Hell yeah. Nothing like some classic 19th-20th century stereotypes about drunken Irishmen to really liven up the picture of a law enforcement organization. Throw in some ass-backwards views about Muslims, and you’ve got a really good Justice Department over there.
The paper also reports that Sessions—in addition to being a bad man—also sucked at the rest of his job, according to McCabe’s book:
He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects.
Per the Post, the rest of the book seems like fairly standard ‘Trump insider blasts Trump admin’ stuff. McCabe dishes on Trump’s relationship with Putin, some other Oval Office habits the big asshole does (like making everyone sit in little chairs in front of the Resolute Desk during meetings), and plenty of indignant shit about the “rule of law” to drive home the point that Trump is definitely not good. Still, the Post’s account of the book paints a picture of Sessions being almost as incompetent and wantonly racist as Trump is, disregarding briefings and rambling about people’s personal appearances or ethnicities. Once again: shocking for someone with the middle name Beauregard!