The list states that Sessions “brought the first anti voter suppression lawsuit in the history of the Department of Justice,” in the 1983 case U.S. v. Conecuh County, when “Sessions sued white Conecuh County election officials, including the Chair of the local Republican Party.”

Sessions is indeed listed on the filing. But John Tanner, a former Bush-era Justice Department appointee and the main attorney on that case, said that while he discussed the case with Sessions, who seemed “interested” and “supportive,” most of the work was done out of the civil rights division. Not every Southern U.S. attorney was cooperative with the civil rights division in that era, but Sessions was.

“We conduct our own investigations, we worked out of the office, the U.S. attorney’s offices sometimes send someone in to introduce the D.C. attorney to the court as a courtesy,” Tanner said. “On that one most of the fact gathering was from having federal observers present, and that is an operation that’s run out of D.C.”

Sessions is also listed on filings in the U.S. v. Dallas County Commission voting rights case, because it took place in his district. But Gerald Hebert, who was the lead civil rights division attorney on that case, said Sessions had little to do with the case itself. The case was a challenge to the county’s at-large method of electing members to the county board of education, contending that it violated black voters’ rights.

“He never filed anything in the Dallas County case that he wrote,” said Hebert, now with the Campaign Legal Center. “Usually, the civil rights division filed the briefs and wrote them. His name would have been included in the CRD draft, which is standard operating procedure.” During his 1986 confirmation hearing, Hebert testified that Sessions had described the ACLU and NAACP as “un-American” and called a white civil-rights attorney “a traitor to his race,” claims that Sessions denied.

Joe Rich, a former civil rights division attorney on the Davis school desegregation case who is now at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, is listed on the Davis filing that includes Sessions’s name. He said he did not recall the Alabama senator being a big part of the case.

“My recollection is that Sessions had very little to do with it,” said Rich. “He was the U.S. attorney, he was probably on the pleading, but I don’t remember him playing a major role in it.”

Reached by email, the attorney for the Justice Department listed on the fourth case, a voting-rights case related to Dallas called U.S. v Marengo County Commission, declined to speak to The Atlantic.

Asked about the discrepancies between Sessions’s 2009 claim to have “filed 20 or 30 civil-rights cases” and the available public documents, the Trump transition team cited Sessions’s other claim, to have “signed 10 pleadings attacking segregation or the remnants of segregation.”