Former attorney general Jeff Sessions and other senior justice department officials impeded an internal departmental investigation into their role in implementing the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy that separated thousands of children from their parents on the border, according to interviews and government records.
Sessions declined to be interviewed by investigators for the department’s inspector general, who conducted an inquiry of the family separation policy, according to a report made public last Thursday by the IG detailing the findings of its inquiry.
As attorney general, Sessions was one of the Trump administration’s most senior officials who devised and implemented the family separation policy. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, called Sessions and his top aides a “driving force” behind the policy.
A second senior justice department official, Edward C O’Callaghan, who served as the justice department’s principal associate deputy attorney general during the family separation policy, similarly refused to answer questions from investigators, according to the report.
Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who now says he regrets his role in implementing the policy, was twice interviewed by investigators, but made misleading statements to them that understated and obscured his role.
As a result of the refusal by Sessions and O’Callaghan to speak to investigators, and Rosenstein having misled the IG, a full historical accounting may never take place into what is perceived as a dark chapter in the nation’s history when more than 3,000 children were separated from their parents. Many of its victims younger than the age of five, some even infants, were held alone at substandard facilities under inhumane conditions.
The Biden administration has promised to reunite families. On 8 January , Biden vowed “our justice department and our investigative arms will make judgements about who is responsible … and whether or not the conduct is criminal”. If such a criminal investigation was undertaken, investigators would have powerful tools available to compel testimony of recalcitrant witnesses.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
