WASHINGTON — As one of President-elect Donald Trump’s closest and most consistent allies, Sen. Jeff Sessions is a likely pick for a top post in his administration. But when Sessions faced Senate confirmation for a job 30 years ago, it didn’t go well.
Nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986, Sessions, R-Ala., was dogged by racist comments he was accused of making while serving as U.S. attorney in Alabama. He was said to have called a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy” and the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”
Sessions was the first senator to back Trump during the campaign and is an architect of Trump’s immigration, counterterrorism and trade policies. His name has been floated for attorney general and secretary of defense. The Trump transition team released a statement Thursday saying the president-elect is “unbelievably impressed” with Sessions, citing his work as a U.S. attorney and state attorney general in Alabama.
But confirmation, even in a Republican-controlled chamber, is not guaranteed.
Sessions had been confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate in 1981 to be the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.
In 1986, however, his racially charged comments and record on civil rights as a U.S. attorney, which Sessions denied, prevented his nomination as judge from going forward. Sessions later withdrew from consideration, though he went on to become state attorney general and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1996.
“Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era, which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past,” the late Massachusetts Democrat, Sen. Edward Kennedy, said during the 1986 confirmation hearing. “It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a U.S. federal judge.”
During the hearing, a former assistant U.S. attorney, Thomas Figures, who is black, said Sessions referred to him as “boy,” and told him to be careful what he said to “white folks.” Sessions said he never called Figures “boy,” but Kennedy produced a letter from an organization of black lawyers that said Figures made the allegation about Sessions to the organization’s investigators at least twice.
“I believe that the statements and actions of Mr. Sessions regarding race, and regarding civil rights, impact tremendously on whether he is decent,” Figures told the committee. Figures died in 2015.
Sessions was also criticized for joking in the presence of an attorney with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK” until he learned they smoked marijuana. During his confirmation hearing, he said his comment “was a silly comment, I guess you might say, that I made.”
Sessions told the committee he made the joke while his office was investigating the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a black man who was kidnapped, beaten and killed by Klansmen who slit his throat and then hanged his body in a tree in Mobile, Ala. The two men were later arrested and convicted.
Sessions said he never meant the joke to suggest he supported the Klan. He said the joke was intended to convey that he thought it was “bizarre” that Klansmen had smoked marijuana after one of their meetings.
Sessions was asked by reporters Thursday whether he thought he would be confirmed by the Senate.
“People have to make that decision. The actual senators will cast those votes on any confirmation,” he said.
