By TODD STACY, Alabama Daily News
PRATTVILLE, Ala. – Jeff Sessions hasn’t changed.
That’s his message to voters as he campaigns to be elected back to the Senate seat he held for 20 years before leaving it to become Attorney General of the United States. He wants Republicans in Alabama to remember the rock-ribbed conservative who often irritated his party’s leadership by pushing his unique brand of conservatism that heavily influenced today’s Trump agenda.
But as he exits the passenger door of a black SUV and strides by himself into the Courtyard Marriott hotel, it’s clear a lot has changed for Sessions.
Gone is the accompaniment of a large staff and security detail. The last time I interviewed Sessions, he arrived at our family’s 2018 Auburn tailgate in a flurry of lights and sirens with about a dozen federal security agents, at least as many local and state law enforcement and several staff members alongside him. That comes with the territory when you are the nation’s top law enforcement official.
More than a year later, on a Friday in Prattville, a suburb fifteen miles up Interstate 65 from the State Capital of Montgomery, Sessions had no entourage, but for a handful of campaign workers waiting to meet him in the lobby.  He’s back on the campaign trail, slogging around to small towns and shaking every voter’s hand. It’s a conspicuous change of scenery from the highest levels of government, but one Sessions’ seems entirely comfortable with as we find a small conference room to begin our interview.
A lot has happened in the last five years for Sessions. He became among then-candidate Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters and delivered an early endorsement in August of 2015 that gave the brash, unconventional Trump needed credibility in the GOP primary. President Trump rewarded him by appointing him attorney general, the pinnacle of Sessions’ career and a major opportunity for someone who has worked as a both a U.S. attorney and Alabama’s attorney general before spending years championing law and order issues in the Senate.
After 20 months as AG, Sessions resigned in November 2018 at the request of the president, who had grown increasingly frustrated by the ongoing Mueller investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 campaign and blamed Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing it. Though Sessions repeatedly justified his recusal as following longstanding Department of Justice policy – he was part of the 2016 Trump campaign and thus a subject of the investigation – Trump never seemed to get over it, and the issue continues to drag Sessions as the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate enters the homestretch.
Just days before the qualifying deadline in November 2019, Sessions shocked Alabama’s political world by announcing he would run for his former seat. With his general popularity among the GOP electorate still high, many political experts predicted Sessions would runaway with the race and win the more than 50% needed to avoid a runoff. That hasn’t happened, as most polls, including a recent Alabama Daily News / Mason-Dixon poll, show Sessions still in a tight race with two other top contenders: former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville and 1st District Congressman Bradley Byrne. The ultimate winner will go on to face incumbent Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in November’s general election.
Just more than a week out of the primary, Sessions is criss-crossing the state to remind Republican voters why they liked him in the first place and kept sending him to the Senate. During a 20 minute sit-down interview for Alabama Daily News and its news partners,