from the chairman. you put the chairman in an awful bad position at this point, because i m not sure that i know where i m going? i don t disagree with anything senator cornyn said, but could you please leave personalities out of it? can i explain what i m doing here? senator cruz is the very thing that senator cornyn is accusing me of doing. in my absence, he misrepresented me, he misrepresented mr. hebert. you didn t object then, did you? i m not sure i was here. it would be the decent and honorable thing to do to do it in the senator s presence. well, get him here. he ll have a tape of it. okay. allow me to read from the hearing transcript. this is senator cruz talking to senator sessions. and what i m doing here is i m
state categorically that sessions had no substantive involvement in any of them. now you originally said that you personally handled three of these cases, but these lawyers say that you had no substantive involvement. chairman grassley, i would ask that that op-ed from last tuesday s washington post be entered into the record. without objection it will be entered. are they distorting your record here? yes. in fact, one of the writers there, mr. hebert, spent a good bit of time in my office. he said i supported him in all the cases he brought, that i was more supportive than almost any other u.s. attorney, and that i provided office space, i signed the complaints that he brought,
lawyer. i m one of the few members of this committee who didn t go to law school and usually i get by just fine but it seems to me that a lawyer, if a lawyer has just his name added to a document here or a filing there, that lawyer would be misrepresenting his record if he said he was personally handling these cases, two of the lawyers who wrote the op-ed have also submitted testimony for today s hearing, mr. jerry hebert and mr. joe rich. mr. hebert says he litigated personally two of the four cases you listed. he said i can state with absolute certainty that mr. sessions did not participate personally in either. mr. rich worked on one of the four cases you listed, he said i never met him at that time, nor any other time and we he had
no input to the case. these represent three of the four cases that you claimed that were among the top ten cases that you personally handled. now, in your 1986 questionnaire, you used phrases like i prepared and tried the case as sole counsel and i was the lead prosecutor on this case assisted by so-and-so. why didn t you use the same level of detail in your 2016 questionnaire? in looking at the this question there, we decided that was an appropriate response, since it was a major historic cases in my office. let me just reply, senator franken, in this fashion. mr. hebert, in 1986, when he testified at my hearing said,
we have had difficulty with several u.s. attorneys in cases we have wanted to bring. we have not experienced that difficulty in the cases i have handled with mr. sessions in fact, quite the contrary. it goes on to say i ve had occasion numerous times to ask for his assistance and guidance. have been able to go to him and he has had an open door policy. and i have taken advantage of that and found him cooperative and that is an accurate statement. i don t know mr. rich. perhaps he indicates that i never worked with. he goes on to say quote i want to no you raised this question mr. franken. one of the cases you listed was a case mr. rich handled so if you don t know him it s hard for me to believe that you personally handled it. when i found that these cases, i had been supportive. you filed. i m sure mr. hebert says and