Trump Urged Sessions To Prosecute Oakland Mayor For Warning City Of ICE Raid
Libby Schaaf
Getty
By Aiden Pink May 16, 2018
President Trump urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday to consider prosecuting Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf on obstruction of justice charges after Schaaf publicly warned the city in February of an upcoming immigration raid, Politico reported.
“I mean, you talk about obstruction of justice, I would recommend that you look into obstruction of justice for the mayor of Oakland, California, Jeff,” Trump said at a roundtable of California elected officials and law enforcement officers. Sessions did not respond.
“She informed them, and they all fled — or most of them fled — and that whole operation, that took a long time to put together,” Trump added. “To me, that’s obstruction of justice. And perhaps the Department of Justice can look into that, with respect to the mayor. Because it’s a big deal out there, and a lot of people are very angry about what happened. There was a lot of hard work and a lot of danger involved. And that was a terrible thing.”
Trump had previously made such comments about Schaaf, but it is the first time he is known to have directed them towards Sessions, the nation’s top prosecutor.
Schaaf, who is Jewish, announced in a press conference at the time that she felt she had an ethical duty to warn those potentially affected ahead of the raid.
“I consider myself a law-abiding citizen. I consider myself a believer in an American democracy that moves towards a more just society. And I definitely consider myself part of the resistance,” she said.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said afterward that they were seeking 864 undocumented people but only managed to detain around 150.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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