President Donald Trump’s basis for wishing he had never named Jeff Sessions attorney general is much different than the reasons the American public should have the same view. In bombshell remarks that confirmed just how much Trump is stomping on ethical norms, the president told The New York Times this week that he was furious about the thing Sessions deserves the most credit for — his high-minded decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election because of his role in Trump’s campaign and his meetings with Russian officials.

What should really bother the public are Sessions’ retrograde views on criminal justice, only starting with his aggressive embrace of asset seizures, a practice that incentivizes policing for profit. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it would reimpose policies suspended by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2015 that allow local and state police to invoke federal law to justify seizing cash, vehicles and other property — without formal criminal charges against the targeted person. The policy change will allow police agencies in 13 states that ban asset seizures without criminal charges to make such property grabs, then keep 80 percent of the proceeds, with 20 percent going to the feds.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein cited two safeguards to prevent abusive practices: Law-enforcement agencies must explain to the Justice Department their probable cause for seizures, and owners of seized property must be more quickly notified by the federal government about their rights and what’s happening with their property.

But those safeguards aren’t remotely strong enough, because giving police agencies a financial motive to take property makes them more likely to rationalize taking the property. A 2014 investigation in The Washington Post showed that over 13 years, local and state law-enforcement agencies seized nearly $2.5 billion from motorists and others without warrants or arrests. Basically anyone with a suspiciously large wad of cash lost their money.

That same year, a story in The New York Times detailed seminars where law enforcement officials were taught how to maximize seizures from people, starting with “cash and cars. Especially nice cars.”

This is a perversion of justice. Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be the rule in the U.S.

But in Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department, whatever police might do seems fine by him. That’s why in April, he signaled he was no longer interested in having his agency pressure law enforcement agencies with a history of unjustified violence against minorities to become more professional — even as cell-phone videos keep providing powerful evidence that police misconduct in the U.S. can be a problem.

Evidence was also not a consideration when Sessions ordered federal prosecutors always to charge defendants with the most serious crimes they could prove and seek the harshest penalties — meaning that federal prisons will be packed with aging inmates long after they are threats to society, people whose lives could have been salvaged with more humane punishment. And not only does lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key not make the public safer, it hammers taxpayers, since aging prisoners cost far more because of their medical problems. This is why dozens of senators — led by former law-and-order conservative Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa — support sentencing reform.

A day after Trump’s disparaging remarks about Sessions, the White House maintained the president is “disappointed” but has “confidence” in his attorney general, a signal he would never sign such a reform to keep his administration tough on crime. Tough on logic, evidence and reason is more like it.