According to three people familiar with the matter, shortly after leaving the Justice Department, Sessions entered talks to join the law firm Maynard Cooper & Gale, which was founded in Birmingham, Ala. With a longtime friend of Sessions’s pulling for him on the inside, the deal seemed all but done.
At the time, Sessions had a small collection of friends and former colleagues in the White House, including Stephen K. Bannon, the chief executive of Trump’s campaign and then his chief strategist in the administration, who has called Sessions his mentor and once pushed him to run for president.
And there he was, just 22 days after his confirmation, issuing the terse statement recusing himself from any investigation his department might undertake into charges that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election — the action that would send the dream spiraling into still weirder territory.
His devotion was so total that, when Trump won, Sessions was a “shoo-in” for whatever cabinet position he wanted, according to a former senior White House official who helped lead the transition. Attorney general was his one request. Credit...
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"Even though we cleared my calendar for the day, I was still on the phone. There was no resting, you just kept on going," Tammy Duckworth says on an episode of PEOPLE's podcast Me Becoming Mom
Sessions’ efforts to dismantle civil rights and civil liberties protection s gained during prior administrations are especially apparent when it comes to criminal justice. He rescinded multiple Obama-era memos, including one that directed federal resources away from enforcing federal drug laws in states that have legalized medical or recreational use of marijuana. The move was part of the former attorney general’s fear-driven agenda to reinvigorate the War on Drugs and to systematically dismantle his predecessors’ efforts to reduce federal imprisonment rates. Among those efforts was Sessions’ directive to prosecutors to bring the harshest possible cases against defendants — including people like Marion Hungerford, a mentally ill woman who was sentenced to 159 years in federal prison for helping to commit a string of armed robberies, even though she never touched the gun.
Sessions did everything in his power to speed up deportations and aid the separation of families, issuing a series of policies that trampled on due process. The Justice Department ended a program to notify immigrants of their rights during deportation cases, set arbitrary and unreasonable quotas for immigration judges, and repeatedly overruled immigration court and Board of Immigration Appeals' decisions on his own initiative.
Following Sessions’ forced resignation, Trump quickly moved to place Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. Whitaker, a lawyer and former prosecutor, was Sessions’ chief of staff. There is little reason to believe that he will not follow in his predecessor’s footsteps on issues of civil rights and civil liberties. All those who care about civil liberties and civil rights will need to keep a close eye on the Justice Department. Sessions’ tenure was a disaster, and his replacement promises more of the same.
Shortly after Trump was inaugurated, Sessions began systematically reversing hard-won legal protections for transgender people. In February 2017, the Justice Department revoked a guidance issued in 2016 by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice on the rights of transgender students under Title IX.
In the past four months, meanwhile, Trump and Tuberville have spoken frequently by phone, sometimes as often as twice a week. In mid-June, Tuberville joined the president on Air Force One when it landed in Dallas. When we spoke at Ruby Tuesday, Sessions acknowledged Tuberville’s appeal.
During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a black assistant U.S. attorney testified that Sessions had once called him “boy” (which Sessions denied) and said the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot” (which Sessions said was a joke).
There he was in early 2016, beaming from the campaign stage in the Huntsville, Ala., suburb of Madison before a crowd of more than 10,000, Trump’s prized opening act, extolling the inception of a “movement.”.
Sessions can probably thank Trump for this. The president remains more popular in Alabama than in virtually any other state, and on March 10, he endorsed Tuberville in a pair of tweets, calling him a “REAL LEADER.”.
On a recent June afternoon, after a long day of running for the Senate, Jeff Sessions retired to a corner booth at a Ruby Tuesday in the south Alabama town of Bay Minette. He wore a blue-and-white gingham button shirt and gray slacks. His eyes were a touch bloodshot and bleary.
The former attorney general is fighting for his political life in Alabama’s Sen ate race, in the shadow of a president who still despises him.
Another heave of the wheel. Sessions considered starting a think tank, an institution that would endeavor to lend a scholarly heft to the right-wing populism that he had long espoused and that was now co-defined with Trump, but he was unable to find financing for the project.
On the morning of March 22, 1981, residents of Mobile, Alabama, awoke to the ominous sign of a flaming cross burning on the courthouse lawn. Swinging from a tree a few blocks away was the lifeless body of 19-year-old Michael Donald. He'd been badly beaten, his throat slashed. The noose around his neck had been knotted 13 times, a Klan signature.
If you were around in the '80s, you might remember that Jeff Sessions failed to get nominated to the federal judiciary in 1986.
In 1992, Alabama passed Education Code Section 16-1-28, which feels like a ZIP code but was actually an extremely nasty piece of legislation. It barred universities from allowing the discussion of anything that might promote "sodomy" on their campuses, which had the effect of basically kicking LGBT groups off campus.
In the context of someone like Jeff Sessions, you'd expect "bipartisan voting" to be code for "forcing himself to vote alongside the GOP's moderate wing." Remember, this is the guy who voted against a defense authorization bill because it contained a clause making it a hate crime to assault gay people (via Politico ).
To call Jeff Sessions' voting record in the Senate "occasionally controversial" would be like calling the Sun itself "kinda on the hot side." As an Alabama senator, the now ex-attorney general planted his questionable flag on votes against anything that even vaguely smacked of progressivism.
Jeff Sessions is a member of the United Methodists Church, which proved to be extremely uncomfortable in mid-2018 following the crisis over border detentions. That June, over 600 clergy and members of the church wrote an open letter to the heads of Sessions' two congregations, asking them to investigate and discipline him under church law.
If there's an overriding character arc in the Netflix drama of Sessions' life, it's that he really doesn't like hate crime laws. So, if you were plotting the narrative of his time in office, you'd probably sketch a whole load of scenes where he sat around refusing to prosecute homophobic and racist crimes.