Jeff Sessions won’t quit, Jim Inhofe says

If there is one person President Donald Trump won’t intimidate, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe is pretty sure it’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“Knowing him as I do, I don’t think he’ll quit,” Inhofe said Tuesday by telephone from Washington. “A lot of men, when they get pressure put on them, they quit. He won’t. He might get fired, but I don’t think he’ll quit.”

Trump’s public attacks on Sessions, including as recently as last week, have created considerable speculation about the former Alabama senator’s future in the administration and what will happen to the various ongoing investigations of Trump and some of his associates if Sessions is ousted.

Sessions was Trump’s earliest supporter in the Senate but has resisted the president’s attempts to get him to intercede in those investigations. Last week Sessions said the Department of Justice will “not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”

Inhofe is both a friend of Sessions’ and an ally of Trump’s. Although not initially in the Trump camp, the senior senator from Oklahoma has been effusive in his praise of the president.

Inhofe said Tuesday he tried last week to intercede on Sessions’ behalf with Defense Secretary James Mattis, the member of the administration with whom Inhofe works most closely.

“Nothing could move me away from my admiration of Jeff Sessions,” Inhofe said. “All I can say is he’s doing what he thinks is best.

“I made it real clear to Jim Mattis. I told him the same thing. And I think I had some influence.”

Inhofe and Sessions go back more than 20 years. In 1996, Sessions was a first-time candidate for the Senate and Inhofe was running for his first full term after winning a 1994 special election.

Inhofe, though, says his warm feelings for Sessions go back even further, to the Alabaman’s failed nomination to the federal judiciary in 1986. Inhofe says Sessions was treated unfairly by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which denied confirmation on a 10-8 vote with two Republican members voting against Sessions.

Sessions was the only Senate candidate Inhofe helped in 1996, and the two have been friends since.

“Yes, he is stubborn,” Inhofe said. “He does exactly what he thinks is right, and he’s not going to be influenced by anyone to do something he doesn’t believe is right.

“Of all the members of the Senate, me included, Sessions was the only one out there supporting Trump (early in the presidential campaign),” Inhofe said. “Nobody else. That doesn’t seem to carry as much water as I think it should.”

Inhofe also had a long but somewhat more complicated relationship with the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died Saturday. The two often disagreed, but Inhofe says he never forgot that McCain was one of the few Republican senators who campaigned for him in that 1994 special election.

“He didn’t just come once,” Inhofe said. “He came twice, and we flew all over the state in a little airplane without air conditioning because my plane had lost an engine.”

Inhofe caught some flak Monday for a sound bite in which he suggested McCain was partly responsible for Trump’s reluctant acknowledgement of his death.

And, in a Monday floor speech, Inhofe said McCain could be “kind of a mean guy. A lot of people didn’t like John McCain.”

But Inhofe also called McCain a “hero” and a champion of the underdog.

Tuesday, Inhofe said it was “absurd” to think he intended to denigrate McCain. The point he was was trying to make to reporters, he said, was that McCain and Trump were “both very strong-willed people.”

In all likelihood, Inhofe will replace McCain as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Inhofe has been acting chairman for the past eight months and managed the defense bill recently passed by Congress.

McCain and Inhofe often disagreed on defense matters. McCain wanted to create another Base Realignment and Closure commission. Inhofe does not, at least for the present. McCain wanted to privatize base commissaries. Inhofe does not.

In his Senate floor speech and in Tuesday’s phone interview, Inhofe portrayed McCain as a forgiving person who loved a good fight but respected his opponents.

After a particularly contentious 2003 debate over a carbon tax bill, Inhofe said McCain told him: “’You won. I lost. Good job.’ And that was it. That says a lot about our relationship.”