The only Fortune 500 CEO serving in Congress rose to support Attorney General Jeff Sessions less than six hours after Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.), the leader of the Senate Democrats, called upon Sessions to resign because he met with the Russian ambassador in 2016 as a senator.

“I rise today to speak in defense of a dear colleague of ours, who is now the Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said Sen. David Perdue (R.-Ga.), who like Sessions was a campaign surrogate for President Donald Trump.

“He is my friend, and more importantly, he is a former colleague of this very body,” he said.

“He’s a man of integrity. He is a man of principle. I trust him and I take him at his word,” the senator said.

Perdue said that Sessions has repeatedly pledged that he would recuse himself from any investigations into Russian meddling in the American political process during the 2016 election cycle.

The attacks on Sessions surprised Perdue, he said.

“I’ve never witnessed anything quite like this in my brief time in the United States Senate,” he said. “The last two years have been very interesting, but never have I seen the hypocrisy that we see going on around this one issue. It is increasingly clear that the Minority Party is singularly focused on sabotaging this new administration at every turn.”

Perdue said it should be remembered that Senate Democrats have used every possible delaying tactic or procedure to hamper the president from building his team. “Our President today, as we stand here in this well, cannot have a staff meeting because he doesn’t have all of his Cabinet members in place.”

Without mentioning her name, Perdue pointed out that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D.-Mo.) Tweeted that she never met with the Russians, only to have her own Twitter feed contradict her.

“Thirty members, as a matter of fact, of this body met with the Russian Ambassador and ambassadors from other nations in 2015 for a sales pitch on President Obama’s deal with Iran,” he said

“Many of them – including the senior senator from Missouri – were open supporters at that time of candidates in the Presidential race,” he said.

Perdue said the Democrats are desperate to spin up scandals, while Republicans are working to reverse the damage done to America and the world by President Barack Obama and his policies.

That does not mean that the Russians are not a concern, he said.

The Russians have invaded their neighbors, threatened our friends, and destabilized regions, such as the Middle East, he said.

“Until there is a definite proof that Russians changed a single vote from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, I will be focused on one thing, and that is doing exactly what the American people sent us up here to do—and I encourage my colleagues to do the same—and that is not to engage in political theater for the sake of partisan politics, but working together to get America back to work,” he said.

Watch Sen. David Perdue (R.-Ga.) stand up Thursday for Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the Senate Floor: