Let’s go ahead and call it a comeback. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on a hot streak.

Late last month he delivered a robust, necessary defense of free speech on college campuses during a speech at Georgetown University’s School of Law. This week — on Wednesday to be precise — Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had sent a Justice Department lawyer to Iowa, where they will help prosecute the killer of a teenager who identified as both male and female.

The victim, 16-year-old Kedarie Johnson, was shot dead in his hometown of Burlington and state prosecutors are pursuing charges of first-degree murder against the man suspected of killing him.

Sessions’ role in this — and his reason for deploying Justice Department attorney Christopher Perras — is to investigate the possibility that a hate crime has been committed and bring federal charges against the killer if that turns out to be the case.

That seems fairly straightforward, but the federal government says it’s rare for the DOJ to send its lawyers to work on state prosecutions, and Sessions apparently requested the unusual level of intervention personally. That’s another very unusual turn-of-events.

Unusual but very welcome from Sessions, who until now has sent signals that he’s anything but a friend to the LGBTQ community. The attorney general is responsible for getting transgender Americans excluded from being counted during the 2020 census, and earlier this month rolled back protections for transgender people under the federal government’s anti-discrimination law.

Still, Sessions has promised to be an aggressive prosecutor of the nation’s hate crime laws, and insofar as this is emblematic of him holding to that pledge, we are very satisfied.

Every time the Attorney General sticks to administering the law and upholding American values like freedom of speech and equal protection, he rehabilitates his image as a creature of politics and reassures Americans that they won’t be ignored or minimized because of political concerns or become victims in a culture war that has become increasingly vicious and dehumanizing.

That’s exactly what Americans should expect from the country’s top law enforcement officer.