Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions returned to the Justice Department on Thursday to retrieve his Cabinet chair.
Clad in a gray suit and red tie, Sessions sat in his brown leather chair in the department’s Great Hall and was praised by his successor, William Barr, and others, according to The Washington Post.
Outgoing attorneys general are traditionally honored with the gift of a Cabinet chair. The Post reported that officials chipped in for Sessions’s gift, which he retrieved months after leaving the Trump administration.{mosads}
Sessions resigned from his post at the request of President Trump in November following months of criticism from the president over his decision to recuse himself from the probe into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
His exit from the administration did not stop Trump from criticizing the former attorney general, who was an early backer of the businessman’s 2016 White House bid and served as a surrogate on the campaign trail.
Trump tweeted in December that Sessions “should be ashamed of himself” for allowing the special counsel investigation into Russian interference to proceed. More recently, he mocked the former Alabama senator in a speech at a major conservative conference and declared that “Sessions didn’t have a clue!”
Former Attorney General Eric Holder received a going-away ceremony in 2015, at which Aretha Franklin sang. Then-President Obama, who was close with Holder, spoke at the ceremony to honor his outgoing attorney general, with the president crying.
Trump did not attend the ceremony Thursday, the Post noted, though his tense relationship with Sessions was alluded to at the event.
“An attorney general’s success is measured by accomplishments, and not the length of service,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said at the event, according to the Post. He also said that “no attorney general’s tenure goes exactly as planned.”