America's top lawman lied under oath. Can we seize his stuff?

Rooted in the so-called “war on drugs” launched in the 1970s and ’80s, civil asset forfeiture — seizing homes, cars, cash or other possessions that allegedly may have been used in the commission of a crime — has been broadly interpreted to allow law enforcement agencies to seize millions of dollars of people’s stuff, even in cases where no one has yet (or ever) convicted of a crime. In some instances, law officers seize the home of a law-abiding citizen merely because they believed someone temporarily staying there — a grandson or a nephew, say — was up to no good.

In just four months in office, Sessions has targeted sanctuary cities, launched new offensives in the discredited “war on drugs” that has made America the world leader in mass incarceration, and said the only problem with police-involved shootings is that the “thin blue line” needs to be fortified. In Sessions World, there is no social problem that can’t be solved by locking more people up and refusing to give human beings the benefit of the doubt.

But here’s the incredible irony. Jeff Sessions isn’t just the nation’s highest ranking law-enforcement officer. He is also — according to evidence that is mounting daily — a prime candidate for criminal prosecution.

It’s an incredible story. As attorney general, Sessions oversees a criminal-justice network, including the FBI, that has made it its business to charge people with lying — in sworn testimony, in written documents, even in interviews with federal agents. Yet back in January, as a U.S. senator seeking confirmation in his high-ranking Trump administration post, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions raised his right hand and swore to tell the whole truth, before telling what seem to be epic lies about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.

When Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota asked Sessions a fairly straight-forward question about reports of links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, the future AG volunteered: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

It turns out, as Sessions later conceded in a follow-up written statement, he’d met with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak. Twice, he insisted — and he doesn’t remember much what they talked about but it wasn’t really the Trump campaign. Honest. Now investigators are probing whether there was at least a third meeting that Sessions didn’t report even when he tried to clear up that first false statement.

That was before this weekend, when things go a lot worse for the embattled attorney general — and not just because he seems to have lost the confidence of President Trump by maneuvering his way out of position to quash the Russia probe. The Washington Post reported that intelligence intercepts revealed that Kislyak may have told his superiors in Moscow that the campaign — and what Trump could do for Vladimir Putin’s government in areas such as lifting sanctions imposed by Obama — was the crux of what he talked to Sessions about. It’s revealing that Sessions’ boss (for now) Trump went on a Twitter diatribe against “leaks” — not against the veracity of the Post report. It increasingly looks as if Sessions lied at his confirmation hearing because the truth was just devastating to speak.

http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/americas-top-lawman-lied-under-oath-can-we-seize-his-stuff-20170724.html