Jeff Sessions insists he was right to recuse himself from the Russia investigation that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, a move that fractured his relationship with President Trump.
“I don’t have regrets,” Sessions said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Capitol Hill. “I’m not a person that worries about regrets. I did what I thought was right. We advanced the president’s agenda, and it was just — I hate it that there was a disagreement over recusal.”
He believes that his very public breach with Trump led to his achievements in Washington being forgotten. “I spent 15 years in the Department of Justice, 20 years on the Senate Judiciary [Committee],” he said. “And in fact, when I got there, I knew more about the department than I thought I would,” Sessions said. “We did a lot of great things that got overlooked in a lot of the controversy.”
Whether Sessions, 72, can reclaim the Alabama U.S. Senate seat he held from 1997 to 2017 will hinge on whether he can repair relations with Trump. He was complimentary about Trump and refused to criticize the president’s public shaming of his performance as attorney general. But he is nevertheless defending his 21 months at the helm of the Justice Department.
Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump during the 2016 campaign, offering his backing at a time when the Republican establishment was shunning the insurgent populist. Sessions lent experienced staff to Trump’s threadbare campaign and helped put policy meat on his agenda.
But Trump blamed the nearly two-year Russia investigation on Sessions’s decision to recuse himself, and that anger extinguished any goodwill the then-attorney general had earned with the president through his loyal support during the campaign. In highly personal attacks, Trump criticized Sessions as “mixed up and confused” and “scared stiff and missing in action.”
Asked about the derisive comments, Sessions said: “I understand the drive and the strength of Trump’s focus, and that was a reason I thought he’d be a strong president. I turned out to be right. I hate it that some of that drive got focused on me, but I decided — to me, I wanted him to be successful as a president.”
Trump has held his tongue since Sessions announced his campaign last week after saying for months in private conversations with Republicans on Capitol Hill that he would publicly oppose his former attorney general in the GOP primary if he ran for Senate in 2020. In Alabama, where the president might enjoy more support from Republicans than he does in any other state, that is no idle threat.
Sessions said that his work as attorney general should boost his campaign with Alabama’s largely Republican, pro-Trump electorate. He ticked off a laundry list of policy achievements, including border security, combating cyberthreats from China, improving protections for religious liberty, and beefing up law enforcement. Sessions lamented that those accomplishments were overshadowed by the focus on his recusal from the Russia investigation.
Sessions joins a competitive Republican primary featuring U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, Alabama State Rep. Arnold Mooney, former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, and Roy Moore, the ex-state judge who lost a 2017 special election to Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Should Trump endorse, it could tip the scales. A Morning Consult poll last moth put Trump’s approval rating in the state at 59%, far above his national average.
