Prior to the confirmation hearings which will determine whether or not he will become the next Attorney General of the United States, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was sent a questionnaire by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions filled out the questionnaire, but he also neglected to provide any information relevant to two decades of his professional life.
The Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way have seen the questionnaire, and they report that Sessions left out some major portions of his life:
- His years as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, from 1981 to 1993.
- His years as attorney general of Alabama, from 1995 to 1997.
- His first term as a senator, from 1997-2002.
What’s most conspicuous about those omissions is that some cover periods of time prior to Sessions being nominated–and rejected by the Senate–to serve as federal judge. That incident took place in 1986. Sessions was deemed too racist to serve as a member of the federal judiciary. And yet now Donald Trump has nominated him to be the chief legal and law enforcement official in the country.
What makes the refusal to release information more ironic (and hypocritical) is that in 2009, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions had this to say about Sonia Sotomayor’s answers to the same questionnaire:
“I want to share a concern that I do have about Judge Sotomayor’s answers to the Senate Judiciary standard questionnaire. It is still incomplete. I know the administration was very proud to dump a lot of records out in what they call ‘record time,’ but here, two weeks later, we still have some serious gaps in those answers to the committee questions.”
Then, in 2010, Sessions made the following remarks about another nominee to the federal bench, Goodwin Liu:
“As a prosecutor, Title 18, Section 1001 makes it a criminal offense to make a false statement to the government. Two years in jail. A felony. This is a certification that these nominees make that it is true and corrected and witnessed by a notary public. A judge who finds that a nominee or someone coming before him left out 117, or now 130 or 140 documents, would consider contemplated [sic], I think.”
Does that mean Sessions needs to be prosecuted? Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen, but it’s certainly reason enough for the Senate to reject Sessions should he not respond in full to the questionnaire he once defended so ardently.
We’re all waiting, Senator Sessions.
Featured Image Via Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License
