Justice Dept. IG Probe Reportedly Finds Sessions Misled Public, Expressly Ordered Family Separation Policy: ‘We Need to Take Away Children’

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Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly misled the public on his direct role in enacting the Donald Trump administration’s border family separation policy in 2018, according to a new Justice Department Inspector General investigation.

Per a New York Times story on the DOJ IG’s draft report, Sessions personally intervened in a call with U.S. Attorneys from regions along the border, explicitly ordering them to prosecute every family under the White House’s new “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

“We need to take away children,” Sessions ordered the DOJ officials, per the IG’s probe. He also wanted them against granting amnesty to families just because they were accompanied by their children. Per the Times:

The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.

The report also implicated then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in forcefully pushing the zero tolerance policy, even going so far as criticizing government attorneys for their failure to prosecute a case involving young children who were “barely more than infants.” Rosenstein pushed back on that finding and, in addition to his interview with the IG, submitted his own 64-page rebuttal to the report.

The DOJ IG’s 86-page report noted that Sessions repeatedly distanced himself from the policy in public — and refused to sit for an interview with the investigators.

“Mr. Sessions distanced his department from the decision, telling CBN News that ‘we never really intended’ to separate children,” the report noted.

“That was false,” it concluded. “[The DOJ] made clear that from the policy’s earliest days in a five-month test along the border in Texas, Justice Department officials understood — and encouraged — the separation of children as an expected part of the desire to prosecute all illegal border crossers.”

In addition, the IG found that the agency’s strict focus on family separation came at a cost, distracting the Justice Department from other urgent law enforcement actions, including missing serious felony cases and releasing sex offenders as well as cutting back on serving warrants.