The other day I got my hair cut at Wayne’s Barbershop in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Wayne has been cutting hair here for 50 years. He opens at 6:00 am. There are often patrons waiting for him to unlock the door. He is a conservative and a quintessential Trump supporter. He told me he would love to cut the President’s hair. He generously shares his political opinions with anyone within earshot. In short, Wayne is my kinda guy.
When the subject turned to Jeff Sessions, Wayne unloaded.
Now understand, Jeff Sessions is almost a home town boy. Jeff may not have gotten his first haircut at Wayne’s, but I would bet long money at short odds it was at a place a lot like it.Sessions grew to manhood in this part of the world. Now he appears to have lost it. In his slow South Alabama drawl Wayne said, “He has been the greatest disappointment to me. If he doesn’t crawl out from under his desk and do something, he ought to resign! At this point, he has been almost worthless to Mr. Trump.”
While his boss is being vilified over imaginary Russian meddling, Attorney General Sessions has gone into the witness protection program. With mounting evidence of misdeeds by high ranking DOJ and FBI officials, he remains mute. Every day it becomes more obvious that the infamous dossier was financed by Team Hillary and her complicit subsidiary the DNC. Now there are reports that a famous Russian oligarch may have contributed to the effort as well. And yet, there is General Sessions hiding under his desk.
As Wayne talked, I listened and thought about what he was saying. He had no idea that I was a recovering politician who occasionally contributes to posts like this one. I was just another Yankee snowbird who was getting a bit shaggy. So, his statements were unsolicited or colored by who he was talking to. He didn’t feel obliged to sound politically correct or pull any punches. He certainly wasn’t uninformed either. I thought of George Gobel who said, “You don’t have to be in who’s-who to know what’s-what.”
Wayne was speaking for millions of Trump supporters and other Americans who view the inaction by Sessions as much more than just disappointing. They see one of the greatest scandals in American history unfolding and only a handful of Members of Congress appear to be willing to dig into it. Mr. Wray, the current FBI Director who reports to Mr. Sessions, seems more interested in misrepresenting the dangers of the Nunes memo than in getting at the facts and punishing real wrongdoing at the highest levels of our FBI and DOJ. This is worse than dereliction of duty.
That very morning, the Wall Street Journal had run a story about a President Trump Tweet encouraging Sessions to investigate Dem crimes that occurred in the previous administration. The authors of the piece feigned confusion. They didn’t seem to understand what the President was talking about. They wrote, “it wasn’t clear what ‘Dem crimes’ Mr. Trump was alleging, but he has previously criticized the Justice Department for not pursuing a prosecution of his 2016 Democratic opponent…”
Not clear? Really?
The writers at the Journal and the their fellow travelers in the media may not understand the Trump tweet, but folks like Wayne are way out ahead of them. They empathize with the Trump frustration. If Wray and Sessions won’t step up, they ought to step down.
That’s my report from Wayne’s Barbershop in South Alabama.
Gil Gutknecht served six terms in the Minnesota House before being first elected to the U.S. House as a Republican in 1994. He served six terms and now consults with several organizations. He lives in Rochester MN with his wife Mary.