Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., speaks to the media outside Trump Tower in New York. Carolyn Kaster/AP
Trump Selects Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General
Sessions serves on the Judiciary Committee and has opposed immigration reform.
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
Sessions, a conservative elected to the Senate in 1996, also serves on the Judiciary Committee. He has opposed immigration reform and the bipartisan move to cut mandatory minimum sentences. Sessions had been nominated by Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship in 1986 but was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee at the time—only one of two judicial nominees blocked by the panel in 50 years—after his colleagues brought up a long history of racist remarks he’d made.
In the testimony, colleagues said he’d referred to the NAACP as an “un-American” group inspired by Communists; he’d referred to a black federal prosecutor as “boy,” and he reportedly said he thought the Klu Klux Klan “was O.K. until I found out they smoked pot.” Sessions was one of the earliest supporters of the Trump campaign.