Why Senators Must Put the Brakes on Sessions AG Nomination

Whats Sen. Jeff Sessions trying to hide?

Thats the unavoidable question raised by numerous omissions in information that Sessions has submitted to a Senate panel, which is planning to consider his nomination as U.S. Attorney General in hearings beginning on Jan. 10.

Lawyers are trained in the skills of precision and detail, as I can attest from my own personal experience as an attorney. But the Alabama Republicans responses to the Senate Judiciary (Committee) Questionnaire are chock full of holes. Theyre glaring.

Sloppy? I doubt it. The replies smack of a politicians ducking tough topics or exercising a selective memory. They dont reflect an attorneys preparing carefully for comprehensive review of his fitness to be the nations foremost lawyer.

Heres why Im skeptical: In recent days, representatives for several civil rights organizations pored over Sessions questionnaire and appendices and came up with potentially hundreds of blatant omissions.

This warrants calling a time out and a delay to the confirmation hearings until the questionnaires requirements are met. The Attorney General has frequently been called the peoples lawyer. The American people deserve nothing less than an open, fair and thorough confirmation process for such a critical job.

President-elect Donald Trump s choice of Sessions for the nations top civil rights enforcement post has sparked a firestorm, given Sessions record of racial insensitivity and hostility to protecting civil rights and his extreme-right ideology.

Once before a president nominated Sessions to uphold the Constitution and serve the American people, then as a lifetime federal judge. Allegations of racist statements and false prosecutions when he was a U.S. attorney in Alabama helped sink his nomination in the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. It was an extraordinary and bipartisan moment in this committees history.

Thirty years later, its even more urgent that his full resume and biography be made available now for the same committee to examine. But given the incomplete records Sessions has submitted, a scrupulous review is impossible.

The questionnaire requires a nominee to give comprehensive information about employment history, major cases litigated, published writings, media interviews, speeches, awards, finances, political activities and memberships, among other data.

The replies that Sessions submitted were pathetically lacking.

There were no records of any speeches by Sessions after June of this year, during the peak of the presidential campaign when he served as an enthusiastic Trump lieutenant. Remarkably, there were no records of speeches made before 1999 (he was elected to the Senate in 1996 and as Alabama Attorney General in 1994).

His replies had no records of any radio or print interviews before 2002, or TV interviews before 1998. Thats although Sessions has been in elected office and the public limelight for decades; researchers for civil rights groups have already found examples of many of these interviews.

For numerous interviews hes given, his questionnaire says no transcript or clips were available. But with just a few strokes on the keyboard you can find these interviews online.

Whats more, researchers turned up at least 40 op-eds signed by Sessions himself that were not included. Numerous interviews he gave to Breitbart News were omitted. As were a number of speeches he made to certain extremist groups.

Finally, speaking of making history in the Senate, you wont find in the original questionnaire any record that Sessions was considered and rejected for a federal district judgeship in 1986. (He included it in a supplemental submission following incredulous press reports, although he listed the nomination as withdrawn.)

Was this inadvertent, or a whitewashing of history? Will Senate Judiciary Committee members have to Google -search his record themselves?

We understand how Washington works -- that people other than Sessions himself worked long hours to compile replies to the questionnaire on his behalf. In the hurry to meet deadlines for an early hearing, there may have been gaps or shoddy work.

Sessions signed the questionnaire, however. Ultimate responsibility for meeting the questionnaires requirements is his. And as a Judiciary Committee member himself, Sessions must know the importance of a nominees questionnaire and the standards required for completing it.

Why hundreds of omissions? How many more are there? What do the omissions say about the diligence and transparency of Trumps nominee for one of the most important cabinet posts?

This nomination process deserves the care and respect of the nominee. And for the Judiciary Committee to do anything less than delay the confirmation schedule and get adequate information from the nominee, with ample time for review, would abdicate its responsibility.

Surely the president-elect and Republican Senate leaders want to avoid any public perception of a rigged nomination process occurring in the days before Trump takes his oath of office. This can be averted today by putting the brakes on the rush to Jeff Sessions confirmation.