As a part of the confirmation process, attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions was asked to fill out a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire that asked him, among other things, to list the 10 “most significant litigated matters which you personally handled.” Among the 10 he listed were four civil rights cases during his tenure as the U.S. attorney for Alabama — three dealing with voting rights and a fourth case about school desegregation.

Three former Department of Justice officials, who had handled three of those four cases, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on January 3 saying that Sessions had “no substantive involvement in any of them.”

In a tense exchange at today’s confirmation hearing with Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., Sessions struggled to define his role.

“I signed ’em. I supported cases and attempted to be as helpful as I could be in helping them be successful in these historic cases,” Sessions said. “If I’m in error I apologize to you. I don’t think I was.”

Franken was clearly not satisfied: “Our country needs an attorney general who doesn’t misrepresent or inflate his involvement on any issue,” he concluded.

Joe D. Rich, one of the former DOJ officials who wrote the Post op-ed, told The Intercept today that he had never met Sessions and that Sessions had no involvement in the case he handled, which dealt with school desegregation. That case revolved around a segregation complaint against a school district in Alabama that was originally filed in 1963 and was not resolved until 1997.

“I never even met Jeff Sessions, and clearly he didn’t have any input into the case when I was working on it,” Rich said.

Rich also forwarded a statement he provided to the committee in which he noted that in 1985 he filed a 39-page supplemental brief in the segregation case and that Sessions’s “name is not listed anywhere on this brief nor on the certificate of service and he had no input into the drafting or review of the brief. Nor did he advise or guide me in any way in the drafting of the brief or any other aspect of the case.”

With respect to Sessions’s name being on the other cases, Rich described it as simply routine — and not evidence that he was personally involved. “Typically — and often required by the local court — the U.S. attorney would often sign the complaint or his name would be on the complaint that was filed and then he would usually have his name on any subsequent briefs or pleadings that were filed on the case,” he said. “That was basically what he did in these cases.”

Gerald Hebert, another civil rights official at DOJ who co-wrote the Post op-ed, disputed Sessions’s claims on MSNBC. “He didn’t sign any papers in the Dallas case or the Marengo case,” Hebert said, pointing to two Alabama civil rights cases that Sessions listed in the questionnaire. “In fact, he questioned the theory and policy and said our cases in his view didn’t have merit.”