Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R), who was often the target of President Trump’s ire during his time in the administration, on Wednesday vowed to work for Trump’s endorsement in the 2020 Alabama Republican Senate primary.
In an appearance on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Sessions, who last week launched a campaign for his former Senate seat, said he knows that Trump doesn’t always get involved in primaries, but he would actively seek the president’s support.
{mosads}”Certainly, I’m going to work for that and will be seeking it,” he said.
The former Alabama senator also praised Trump’s “conservative agenda,” saying his performance in the White House has been “better than almost any president in my lifetime.”
Asked by host Laura Ingraham if there was anything he’d like to say to the president, Sessions responded by reminding her that he was the first senator to back Trump.
“He didn’t have a better supporter in the United States Senate than when I was there,” he said. “I was his first supporter in the United States Senate, and if I go back to the United States Senate, he won’t have a more aggressive, determined supporter when I get back.”
Sessions last Thursday entered a crowded Republican primary field that is vying to challenge Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.). Sessions launched his campaign by releasing an advertisement that appealed directly to what he viewed as the many accomplishments from the Trump administration.
He also tried to separate himself from other past Cabinet members, stating, “When I left President Trump’s Cabinet, did I write a tell-all book? No.”
“Did I go on CNN and attack the president? Nope. Have I said a cross word about our president? Not one time,” he said.
Trump tapped Sessions to be his attorney general shortly after winning the 2016 election, praising him at the time as a “world-class legal mind.” But his views of the former senator quickly soured after Sessions recused himself from an investigation into Russia’s election interference. Trump once described Sessions’s Justice Department as a “total joke.”
Sessions agreed to resign at Trump’s request following the 2018 midterm elections.
Asked about Sessions’s candidacy last week, Trump said that the White House has not “gotten involved.”
“I saw he said very nice things about me … But we’ll have to see,” Trump said. “I haven’t made a determination.”
Trump on Saturday attended the college football game between LSU and Alabama with Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), a congressman who is also running for the Republican Senate nomination in the state.