President Donald Trump is thinking about replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions with the former mayor of New York City himself, Rudy Giuliani.
It is well known that Trump and Sessions are currently on poor terms, with the president even lashing out at his attorney general in a Monday morning tweet. Now it appears that Trump is suggesting firing Sessions and replacing him with Giuliani, according to a report by Axios.
The article stressed that Trump has a long history of floating names as possible personnel replacements without following through on them, so this may very well be a trial balloon. What's more, Giuliani's close relationship with Trump may make him a hard sell to many in the Senate who want the Department of Justice to retain its independence, at least when it comes to legal matters in which the president himself could be theoretically implicated.
Then again, this isn't the first time that Trump has considered picking Giuliani for a powerful cabinet post. The former mayor was one of Trump's earliest possibilities for the position of secretary of state, although his ties to lobbyists from Iran, Qatar and Venezuela made that possible nomination increasingly untenable.
It is notable that Giuliani, like Sessions, has a less-than-stellar record on race issues. Giuliani is widely associated with New York City's controversial stop-and-frisk policies, while Sessions has a long history of opposing civil rights. While these problematic stances may not hurt Giuliani's chances for confirmation among his fellow Republicans, they would suggest that Sessions' hypothetical ouster from the Department of Justice would not meaningfully change how that department is run in the Trump era.
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