November 7, 2018

Jeff Sessions’ Long National Nightmare Is Finally Over

Chip Somodevilla/CNP via ZUMA

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I just woke up from one of my dex-induced 3-hour naps to learn that this has been a bad week for people named Sessions. The first to go was Rep. Pete Sessions, son of former FBI director William Sessions, and today it was the turn of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former senator from the great state of Alabama. Both are Eagle Scouts.

So Jeff Sessions has finally been fired. For the nonce, he has been replaced by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. It doesn’t appear that Whitaker was ever an Eagle Scout, but he did play in the Rose Bowl for Iowa. In any case, this will all change whenever Trump gets around to nominating a permanent replacement—unless Trump decides to stick with Whitaker. Whoever it is, I think one thing we can be sure of is that it won’t be someone who will recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

By the way, the Washington Post reported on this three weeks ago:

President Trump talked recently with Jeff Sessions’s own chief of staff about replacing Sessions as attorney general, according to people briefed on the conversation, signaling that the president remains keenly interested in ousting his top law enforcement official….On a long list of indignities that Sessions has endured from his boss, Trump’s discussing replacing him with his own top aide stands out.

I imagine this was fake news at the time, but whaddayaknow? It turned out to be real news after all. Trump just didn’t want to announce it before the election, when it might have pissed off some of his supporters, who were big Jeff Sessions fans.

I wonder who else Trump is itching to fire? Rod Rosenstein maybe? Does anybody have a pool going?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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