Jeff Sessions resigns as Donald Trump’s attorney general

Just one day after the 2018 midterm elections, and after months of harassment, President Donald Trump has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign.

During his nearly two years running the Department of Justice, Sessions was the most important player in Trump’s crackdown on immigration — an effort to reduce the number of mostly Hispanic migrants entering the United States, which the president dressed up as protecting the “rule of law.”

As Vox’s Dara Lind put it: “If President Trump and all his appointees left office tomorrow, instead of Sessions, the mark Sessions has left on policy would be the most enduring.”

As to what happens next with the Muller investigation, Sessions will be replaced as acting attorney general by Matthew Whitaker — a man who once suggested special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt.”

Whitaker had served as Sessions’s chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions at the Justice Department. And while the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, would typically be tapped to take over in an acting role, Trump chose Whitaker instead.