Not content to let Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) be the only ones to drag Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for misrepresenting his record during his Attorney General confirmation hearing, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) took Sessions to school over his involvement (or lack there of) in several civil rights cases that occurred while he served as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama in the ‘80s.
A diligent fact-checker with professional knowledge of comedic timing, Franken confronted Sessions again and again with his own misleading quotes—about his involvement in the desegregation of Alabama’s schools, the number of desegregation cases that he filed during his time in office, and the number of litigated matters he “personally handled”—and the truth, which is that three of the attorneys who worked at the Department of Justice alongside Sessions “state categorically that Sessions had no substantive involvement in any” of the civil rights cases he’s recently bragged about.
“I’m one of the few members of the committee that didn’t go to law school and usually I get by just fine,” Franken remarked. “But it seems to me that if a lawyer has just his name added to a document here and a filing there, that lawyer would be misrepresenting his record if he said he had personally handled these cases.”
That any of this will prevent Sessions from becoming Attorney General seems unlikely, but until that moment—and beyond—let us huddle around these bolstering clips like the Little Match Girl gripping her last match. It’s warm, isn’t it?