In the media, Sen. Jeff Sessions has been under fire since it was announced he was Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general.
“I say that the people making these allegations don’t know Jeff Sessions,” said William Smith, the first Republican African-American chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in an interview Monday on “Fox & Friends.” Smith was hired by Sessions.
“When it comes down to the issues, if you look at Jeff Sessions’ history, he did prosecute the head of the KKK, made sure that he received the death penalty, [and] he desegregated the schools in Alabama,” Smith added.
Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, has recently been the subject of criticism for a joke he told while he was a U.S attorney in Alabama regarding the Ku Klux Klan.
Sessions joked that he thought that the KKK “was OK until [he] found out they smoked pot,” reported The New York Times in an articleheadlined, “Specter of Race Shadows Jeff Sessions.”
This, among other allegations, including that Sessions called a black man “boy” (which Sessions denies), was brought up in Senate confirmation hearings when Sessions was nominated to a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. The Senate Judiciary Committee never reported his nomination out of committee and Reagan later withdrew it.
“If you look at 1996, if you look at 2006, if you look at 2016, [there were] no allegations against Jeff Sessions. These people are just bringing up false rumors just because they don’t like the policies Jeff Sessions is going to bring,” Smith said.
While he was U.S attorney, Sessions also filed multiple lawsuits aimed at desegregating Alabama schools, and prosecuted Henry Francis Hays, the son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for murder, according to The Weekly Standard. Hays was executed by electric chair in 1997.
In February, Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump, and became one of Trump’s surrogates later in the campaign.
This story was updated to clarify the Senate’s action in 1986.
