Political Quotes

“Now, on another matter, Mr. President, criminal justice reform. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Federal prosecutors to ``charge and pursue the most serious readily provable offense,'' even for low-level drug crimes. Functionally, this means Federal prosecutors will seek the harshest possible penalty even for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes. This is a significant reversal from the Obama-era Smart on Crime Initiative, in which Federal prosecutors were instructed to focus on more dangerous drug traffickers and avoid charging less-serious offenders with crimes that required long, mandatory minimum sentences. As a result of the Obama policies, Federal drug cases dropped by more than 19 percent between 2012 and 2016, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Cases with charges carrying longer, mandatory minimum sentences fell precipitously, from nearly 60 percent in 2012 to 45 percent last year. Thanks in part to this initiative, President Obama became the first President since Carter to leave the White House with a smaller Federal prison population than when he took office. Meanwhile, prosecutions of the more serious crimes--the evil drug dealers, those who run the drugs, often from out of this country to here, they are the ones we can really go after and need to go after-- increased by 17 percent and 14 percent, which makes it the way we can stop these evil drugs from coming into this country. So that policy was tough on crime and smart on crime.…”