The fact that the current administration is cleaning its Justice Department house by turning over personnel appointed by the prior administration is not notable. Washington bureaucracy is run by the party-in-charge, and right now that means that President Trump is calling the shots on whom he employs and doesn’t employ. For example, Attorney General Janet Reno took similar steps in the early days of President Clinton’s administration.
What qualifies Mr. Sessions for a nomination for the “Worst Employer of 2017” is how he handled communicating the news of the terminations. Via NBC News:
The Trump administration’s sudden request on Friday that all 46 U.S. attorneys resign was met with surprise by multiple federal prosecutors, with at least one first finding out about the demand on social media, a source close to the U.S. attorney told NBC News.
“We saw it on Twitter,” said the source, who is not the prosecutor and who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. …There is nothing easy about communicating a firing. I’ve had to fire people. It’s the worst part of any job. It’s also part of what you sign up for when you assume a management role. But, as uncomfortable as it is to tell someone they are losing a job, it is exponentially more difficult to be on the receiving end of that news.
Every employee deserves to learn of a job-loss via a face-to-face conversation. It is never acceptable to fire someone by a phone call, letter, voice mail, email, text message, Facebook message, tweet, or any other method of communication other than a face-to-face conversation.
For this reason, and this reason alone, I nominate Attorney Jeff Sessions as the Worst Employer of 2017.