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The Jeff Sessions hearings are under way. Mr. Sessions would like to bring his brand of old-school Klansman-style racism into our country’s Department of Justice. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota got his chance to ask Sessions questions and he decided to stick very specifically with the outrageous attempts by Sessions and his supporters to portray racist Sessions as some kind of civil rights freedom fighter. Sen. Franken began with some cordial opening statements and then got into the record, more specifically Sessions’ attempts to say he was personally involved in ending racism.
Franken: Now, in that same interview you said, "I filed 20 or 30 civil rights cases to desegregate schools and political organizations and county commissions when I was United States attorney.” So 20 or 30 desegregation cases. Did I misread that quote?
Sessions: I believe that's what I have been quoted as saying. I suspect I said that.
Franken: Okay. Now, that was 2009. In November -- your office said when Senator Sessions was U.S. Attorney he filed a number of desegregation lawsuits in Alabama. Not 20 or 30 this time, but a number. Tell me, did you file 20 or 30 desegregation cases, or is it some other number?
Sessions: Well, thank you, Senator Franken. It is important, first, to be accurate. The records don't show that there were 20 or 30 actually filed cases. Some of the cases involve multiple defendants and multiple parties like to a school board and a county commission being sued for racial discrimination or things of that nature, but the number would be less than that, as we've looked at.
Franken: What do you think would have caused you to say --
Sessions: I don't know --
Franken: --That you filed 20 or 30 desegregation
Sessions doesn’t have an answer to this except it was a long while ago, so many cases, hard to remember exact numbers. Sessions can’t remember ONE case, let alone 20 or 30. Sen. Franken moves on to the cases that Sessions himself claimed “personal involvement” with and put on the questionnaire for the very job interview he is doing as we speak.
Franken: You originally said you personally handled three of these cases, but these lawyers say that you had no substantive involvement. Chairman Grassley, I would ask that that op-ed from last Tuesday's Washington Post be entered into the record. Without objection, it will be entered. Are they distorting your record here?
Sessions: Yes. In fact, one of the writers there, Mr. Hebert, spent a good bit of time in my office. He said I supported him in all the cases he brought, that I was more supportive than almost any other U.S. Attorney, and that I provided office space, I signed the complaints that he brought, and as you know, may know, Senator Franken, when a lawyer signs a complaint, he is required to affirm that he believes in that complaint and supports that complaint and supports that legal action, which I did. We sued --
Franken: So that's your personal involvement was that your name was on it?
Sessions tries to speak around this by taking a page out of Kellyanne Conway’s book of saying a bunch of words in the form of recognizable sentences that in their entirety don’t mean anything. Sen. Franken is undeterred.
I want to get through this here. On the docket sheet, my name is listed, number one. As attorney for the case? I'm not a lawyer. I'm one of the few members of this committee that didn't get to law school, and usually I get by just fine, but it seems to me a lawyer -- if a lawyer has just his name added to a document, he -- that lawyer would be misrepresenting his record if he said he was personally handled these cases.
Two of the lawyers who wrote the op-ed have also submitted testimony for today's hearing. Mr. Jerry Herbert and Mr. Joe Rich. Mr. Hebert said he litigated two of the four cases you listed. He said I can state with absolute certainty that Mr. Sessions did not participate personally in either. Mr. Rich worked on one of the four cases you listed. He said, "I never met him at that time nor any other time, and he had no input to the case." These represent three of the four cases that you claimed that were among the top ten cases that you personally handled. Now, in your 1986 questionnaire, you used phrases like "I prepared and tried the case as sole county." "I was a lead prosecutor on this case assisted by so and so." Why didn't you use the same level of detail in your 2016 questionnaire?
This set up a real gotcha moment as Sessions became heated, explaining how he was “supportive” to Mr. Herbert, but did not even know Mr. Rich.
Sessions: I don't know, Mr. Rich. Perhaps he handled a case that I never worked with. He goes on to say --
Franken: One of the cases --
Sessions: No, you raised this question.
Franken: One of the cases that you listed was a case that Mr. Rich handled. If you don't know him, it's hard for me to believe that you personally handled it.
Powerful.
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