MONTGOMERY, AL--After a harrowing defeat to a political novice, former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that there is a possibility he's made a few missteps in the past three years.
"I may backed the wrong horse," Sessions said. "President Trump may not be 100 percent honorable."
Sessions ran unopposed for his former senate seat in 2014 and almost certainly would have been a senator for life but then he embarked on a disastrous relationship with President Donald Trump. Sessions became the first senator to endorse the then-reality TV star and occasionally successful businessman.
"We had a great first meeting. He flew in for a rally and we're about to go out in front of an arena full of people and he says to me, 'You're a lot shorter in person. And what's the deal with those ears?'," Sessions said, chuckling. "That's how he shows he likes you, or at least that's what I thought."
After Trump's surprising win in 2016, he nominated Sessions to become attorney general. The two began sparring almost immediately. Sessions' dreams of imposing long sentences on people caught with a tiny amount of pot were derailed after he recused himself from investigating alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump reportedly mocked Sessions' southern drawl and called him Mr. Magoo -- a reference to a cartoon character who had impaired vision and a progressive judicial philosophy.
"I knew it was an insult when I learned Mr. Magoo was not an originalist," Sessions said.
Sessions was eventually forced out of office in 2018, meanwhile, Democrat Doug Jones won a special election for Sessions' old seat in 2017 defeating teenage girl enthusiast Roy Moore. Sessions hoped to challenge Jones in November, but received less than 40 percent of the vote in a primary runoff against a Trump-endorsed former college football coach, Tommy Tuberville.
"Yes, the story of Icarus has been brought up a time or two," Sessions said.
Sessions campaign manager, Ron Klug, did not appear willing to answer questions following Tuesday's defeat.
"You wanna know what went wrong? Nothing! Everything is great! We've got a Democrat in office, the president screwed us, and we lost to a guy who committed securities fraud and was run off from his last three jobs. Things couldn't have gone better, jackass!" Klug said.
Sessions, 73, tried to stay optimistic about his political future.
"It's like my dad, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Jr., used to say, 'If you step in a bucket don't go walkin' around with it.' And I'm going to..." Sessions paused to respond to an alert on his phone. "It's from the president! Maybe he's texting to apologize... oh, it just says, 'you lost, bigly.' He does stuff like that sometimes. He's under a lot of pressure. Maybe he didn't mean it."