Attorney general Jeff Sessions has told political allies in Alabama he is not considering running for his old Senate seat as a write-in candidate in next month’s special election. That’s according to a spokeswoman for Sessions at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, who also tells me Sessions is telling Alabama Republicans he is not considering being appointed to the seat if Roy Moore wins and is not seated by or expelled from the Senate.
The New York Times reported Monday that two White House officials independently discussed the idea of Alabama governor Kay Ivey blocking Moore so that she could “immediately appoint” Sessions to the vacant seat. The White House has not said whether it has discussed this with Sessions. “As a policy we don’t discuss White House communications,” Flores said.
Sessions resigned from the Senate in January after being confirmed as attorney general. Ivey’s predecessor, Governor Robert Bentley, appointed Luther Strange to the Sessions seat, but Strange lost the Republican primary for the December special election to Moore.
Last week, Moore was accused by four different women of having pursued a sexual relationship when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers. One woman told the Washington Post that he had touched her sexually when she was just 14. A fifth accuser emerged on Monday afternoon, claiming in a news conference that, around the same time as the other alleged incidents, Moore groped her when she was 16.
There has been some discussion of Strange, Sessions, or some other Alabama Republican running as a write-in for the December 12 election, which would possibly split the GOP vote and give the seat to Democrat Doug Jones. Strange has not ruled out running as a write-in.
More and more Republicans in Washington, though conspicuously not President Trump, have called on Moore to drop out of the race. Among them is Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who on Monday said he believed Moore’s accusers.
Cory Gardner, the Colorado senator and chairman of the Republicans’ senatorial campaign committee, released a statement Monday afternoon saying that Moore is “unfit to serve” in the Senate and should step aside. Gardner added that if Moore does win the election, that the Senate should expel him immediately. My colleague John McCormack recently outlined how the Senate could do something like that, starting with the Senate’s ethics committee.
