WASHINGTON, D.C. — Chanting “lock him up” and holding signs reading “resign,” at least 100 protesters and members of Congress stood outside the Department of Justice building Thursday to send a message to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and Dwight Evans (D-PA), joined the growing list of Congressional Democrats calling on Sessions to resign for lying under oath about his communications with Russia.
“Jeff Sessions must go — he must resign now — and if he doesn’t, Donald Trump is going to have to dust off a complete sentence he used to know how to execute: You’re fired,” Raskin said.
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Speaking to ThinkProgress between chants, Scott Nolte said he hopes that more Republican lawmakers follow their colleagues and demand that Sessions resign, or at least recuse himself from any investigations into the administration’s alleged ties to Russia.
“He is the chief law enforcement officer of this country, and if this guy can’t follow the laws of this country and can’t testify truthfully under oath, how can we expect him to hold the administration and it’s members accountable?” he asked. “We can’t. It starts at the top and it has to be honest at the top and if it’s not, everything else is suspect.”
Progressive advocacy group MoveOn, which organized the rally, has collected almost 150,000 signatures on an online petition calling for a special prosecutor to lead an investigation into the entire Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia. Members of progressive groups including the Center for American Progress (CAP) joined the calls for a resignation and an investigation (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent website housed at CAP).
During their lunch breaks, other DC-area protesters told ThinkProgress that it’s too late for Sessions to clear his name. Rich Clayton said that everyone should be worried about Sessions’ reliability.
“It’s well past the point of an acceptable mistake that he could have corrected,” he said.
Marione Ingram, a Holocaust survivor and civil rights activist, told ThinkProgress that the Trump administration’s suppression of the press, manipulation, and scapegoating are all things she has seen before. “I’m here and I will lend my voice to others because I believe that we are all in the same boat — and if we don’t row together, we’ll all drown,” she said.