Bloomberg | Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley blasted Attorney General
Jeff Sessions after Sessions criticized his criminal justice overhaul a
day before a committee vote.
Sessions
wrote a letter charging that the legislation -- approved Thursday by
the Judiciary Committee on a 16 to 5 vote -- could let the “very worst
criminals” and gang members out of prison early. Grassley accused the
attorney general of being ungrateful, saying that he had supported
Sessions when President Donald Trump
wanted to fire him and protected him from repeated Democratic demands
for public hearings on Sessions’s contacts with Russians in 2016.
“I
think it’s legitimate to be incensed and I resent it, because of what
I’ve done for him. He had a tough nomination, a tough hearing in my
committee,” Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in an interview Wednesday
in his Capitol Hill office.
"They wanted to call him back every other day for additional
hearings about his Russian connection, and I shut them off of that until
we had the normal oversight hearing in October I believe it was, see?
And the president was going to fire him, and I backed him, you know? So
why wouldn’t I be irritated?"
Grassley’s
remarks came after repeated accusations by Trump and some of his allies
of anti-Trump political bias at the Justice Department. The president
was angry when Sessions last year recused himself from the investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That helped lead to the
appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Grassley said that
when Sessions’s job was in trouble, he told reporters he didn’t have
time to hold a hearing for a new nominee for attorney general. Grassley
also rejected calls by Democrats to bring Sessions before the committee
to face questions about his failure to disclose his contacts with
Russians, including then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in response
to questions at his confirmation hearing. Democrats on the committee had
to wait until the regular committee oversight hearing with the attorney
general to confront him publicly.
Taking his grievance over the
letter to Twitter on Wednesday, Grassley said Sessions was acting like
he was still a senator instead of a member of the executive branch with
the responsibility of implementing the laws, not making them.
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