WASHINGTON _ Attorney General Jeff Sessions' disconnect with his boss, President Donald Trump, is extending beyond their disagreement about the Russia probe to disagreeing on policy issues for which Sessions would normally speak for the administration _ notably, prison reform.
The White House has embraced bipartisan legislation that would ease sentences and beef up prisoner re-entry and anti-recidivism programs. Sessions, on the other hand, says that will just create new victims and he has thrown his weight behind legislation to toughen and lengthen prison sentences.
"We need Congress to fix the law so that we can keep violent career criminals off of our streets," Sessions told law enforcement officials in Little Rock, Ark., earlier this month. "That shouldn't be controversial." He was referring to the Armed Career Criminal Act, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutionally vague in 2015, and which some Senate Republicans are rewriting.
