Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sent a federal hate-crimes lawyer to Iowa, where he will assist with the local prosecution of a man accused of killing a transgender high school student in 2016, officials with knowledge of the matter told The New York Times on Sunday.
It's a move that has surprised critics of Sessions, who have called him out for reversing a policy that encouraged schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms that match their gender identity and announcing that the Justice Department no longer considered gay or transgender people protected from workplace discrimination. People who know Sessions told the Times he is more likely to look at filing civil rights charges in individual cases, rather than trying to tackle a systemic problem.
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