{"id":30669,"date":"2018-11-17T16:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T00:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/11\/17\/trumps-next-attorney-general-unlikely-to-care-for-marijuana-legalization\/"},"modified":"2018-11-18T00:54:33","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T08:54:33","slug":"trumps-next-attorney-general-unlikely-to-care-for-marijuana-legalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/11\/17\/trumps-next-attorney-general-unlikely-to-care-for-marijuana-legalization\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Next Attorney General Unlikely to Care for Marijuana Legalization"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Marijuana was almost certainly the last thing on Donald Trump\u2019s mind when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with Matthew Whitaker, a Trump loyalist who had served as Sessions\u2019 chief of staff (and as Trump\u2019s \u201ceyes and ears\u201d in the Justice Department<\/a>).<\/p>\n

We know cannabis was a low priority, tied only with the infinite number of other things in this world and the next that are not Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller\u2019s investigation into the Trump Organization and Trump campaign\u2019s possible campaign violations and ties to Russian intelligence,\u00a0because Trump has told us so,<\/a> time<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No matter what that marijuana entrepreneur in your social media feed is posting, it is beyond obvious that Sessions was fired because he wouldn\u2019t fire Mueller \u2014 triggering a serious constitutional crisis in the process, something that was beyond even Sessions\u2019\u00a0ken \u2014 and that\u00a0Whitaker<\/a>, who once served on the board of a company that the Federal Trade Commission revealed to be a criminal enterprise, is in his position, running the Justice Department, solely to get in Mueller\u2019s way \u2014 possibly in ways that Whitaker has already mentioned,\u00a0live on CNN.<\/a><\/p>\n

Whitaker may or may not serve for a while. This is Trump world \u2014 nobody can say. In a recent ramble with the Daily Caller, the president declined to name any potential long-term replacements. In the past, however,\u00a0Trump has floated two familiar names<\/a>, neither of which should inspire any investor confidence or sanguine Facebook posts: Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and current Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.<\/p>\n

Both have well-established records on cannabis. Both are really notably awful.<\/p>\n

Christie, who debased himself by jumping on the Trump train early only to find himself\u00a0auditioning for a job as a talk-radio host rather than one in Washington<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and secured neither \u2014 once said that if elected president, he would sic the Justice Department on states like Colorado that legalized marijuana, and frequently referred to cannabis as a gateway drug while justifying denying it to sick people.<\/p>\n

Christie has many flaws, but opportunistic pliability is apparently not one of them:\u00a0In a more recent interview, Christie said<\/a>\u00a0\u201cstates have the right to do what they want on this.\u201d That\u2019s a far cry from endorsing full-scale federal marijuana legalization \u2014 or allowing banks to accept marijuana-related accounts, or allowing marijuana businesses to be taxed like normal businesses, or any of the other numerous reforms the industry needs \u2014 but it\u2019s progress. Whether Christie would act on that statement (or whether he ever gets within a mile of the Justice Department except for the public tour) is far from certain. Maybe even unlikely! Christie is, well, kind of a loser, and Trump isn\u2019t so big on losers.<\/p>\n

As for Bondi, she is attorney general of Florida<\/a>, a state that approved medical marijuana by an overwhelming margin on the night Trump was elected in 2016. She is also the attorney general whose office is fighting against a raft of lawsuits brought by marijuana advocates who say that medical cannabis in Florida is unworkable.\u00a0In August, Bondi\u2019s office filed a 57-page brief<\/a>, full of very good and rational arguments why Floridians shouldn\u2019t be allowed to access marijuana in its simplest, cheapest, and most recognizable form.<\/p>\n

Bondi was first elected to the post in 2010 and will be soon termed out. She would seem to be a better fit to join Team Trump than Christie, who has been out of politics and, well, sort of irrelevant since his exit from the governor\u2019s mansion.<\/p>\n

Whomever Trump appoints, it doesn\u2019t appear likely they will tamper with the country\u2019s marijuana legalization experiment. Doing so would be a costly and vastly unpopular mess. It would trigger outrage among Republicans, it would give Trump\u2019s opponents yet another club to hit him with. It would be a real loser! If it didn\u2019t happen under Sessions, it is likely to never happen.<\/p>\n

But will they speed legalization along? If cannabis ended the Mueller investigation, Trump would have done so in summer 2017. Since marijuana does not do that, it\u2019s probably savvier to consider whom Trump counsels for advice \u2014 his family,\u00a0cabinet and top advisors<\/a>. Marijuana prohibition is ending; it\u2019s a question of when. It will also be a question of after \u2014 after Christie, after Bondi, after Trump\u2019s attention is not absorbed with, alternately, the Mueller probe or whatever is it front of him at that particular moment. At the same time, if \u201cFox and Friends\u201dlaunches a \u201cThe president should legalize marijuana\u201d segment, all bets are off.<\/p>\n

TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0are you following who might become the next attorney general?<\/p>\n

The post Trump\u2019s Next Attorney General Unlikely to Care for Marijuana Legalization<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: Trump\u2019s Next Attorney General Unlikely to Care for Marijuana Legalization<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marijuana was almost certainly the last thing on Donald Trump\u2019s mind when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with Matthew Whitaker, a Trump loyalist who had served as Sessions\u2019 chief of staff (and as Trump\u2019s \u201ceyes and ears\u201d in the Justice Department). We know cannabis was aContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6418,50,214,95,96,119,901,6417,6506,6507],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30669"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30670,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30669\/revisions\/30670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}