Jeff Sessions says he handled these civil rights cases. He barely touched them.
By J. Gerald Hebert, Joseph D. Rich and William Yeomans January 3 at 4:53 PM
J. Gerald Hebert is director of the Voting Rights and Redistricting Program at the Campaign Legal Center. Joseph D. Rich is co-director of the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. William Yeomans is a fellow in law and government at American University’s Washington College of Law; on Election Day, he worked as a voter protection legal volunteer for the Democratic Party of Virginia.
Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions is trying to mislead his Senate colleagues, and the country, into believing he is a champion for civil rights. We are former Justice Department civil rights lawyers who worked on the civil rights cases that Sessions cites as evidence for this claim, so we know: The record isn’t Sessions’s to burnish. We won’t let the nominee misstate his civil rights history to get the job of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
In the questionnaire he filed recently with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions (R-Ala.) listed four civil rights cases among the 10 most significant that he litigated “personally” as the U.S. attorney for Alabama during the 1980s. Three involved voting rights, while the fourth was a school desegregation case. Following criticism for exaggerating his role, he then claimed that he provided “assistance and guidance” on these cases.
We worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which brought those lawsuits; we handled three of the four ourselves. We can state categorically that Sessions had no substantive involvement in any of them. He did what any U.S. attorney would have had to do: He signed his name on the complaint, and we added his name on any motions or briefs. That’s it.
To understand why that was the sum total of Sessions’s work, it helps to know that the Civil Rights Division in Washington takes the lead in investigating and trying voting rights and school desegregation cases. Division lawyers decide which cases to bring, where to bring them and the contours of the legal theory presented to the court. When a complaint is filed, the custom is for the local federal prosecutor, the U.S. attorney, to sign it and perhaps other substantive court filings. This step is a mere formality. In rare cases, the U.S. attorney also provides input to the Civil Rights Division attorneys about the substance of the case or the legal strategy. But the role is limited to that of an adviser to the division lawyers driving the litigation.
Sessions’s attempt to pass himself off as a civil rights hero is particularly brazen given his history with the nominations process. In 1986, as part of his rejected bid to become a federal district court judge, Sessions filled out a similar questionnaire and had to provide the same information about his most important cases. Yet he listed none of the civil rights cases he now touts, even though all of those cases either were in progress or had reached a decision by that time. Instead, he chose to highlight his criminal prosecutions.
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