Senator Jeff Sessions, A Corrupt Dept. Of Justice, & 30 Year Old Allegations Of Racism

sessions-trumpPresident Elect Trump has named Senator Jeff Session as his choice to take over the Department of Justice as our nation’s Attorney General.  Assuming that he is approved by the Senate, Senator Sessions will be taking over department that has become the most politicized and corrupted of all departments under Obama.

The DOJ under Obama has, despite the plain language of the civil rights laws, refused to apply those laws to protect protect whites or to prosecute minorities.  The DOJ has unilaterally and unconstitutionally amended the civil rights laws to apply to new groups not included by Congress, specifically homosexuals and transsexuals.  The DOJ has put men in bathrooms next to our young daughters and subjected men at universities to radical feminist witch hunts.  They have failed to defend our religious rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.  They have stood by while other branches of the government stonewalled virtually every lawful oversight investigation and FOIA request.  The Obama DOJ has become a partner of sorts with the BLM movement.  The DOJ has largely refused to investigate vote fraud.  And then there is the Clinton investigation, one that appears to involve criminal obstruction of justice by DOJ attorneys.  Lastly, Obama’s AGs have packed the DOJ with progressive attorneys, applying an unlawful political litmus test to hiring practices. The DOJ not only needs reform and return to the rule of law, but more than a few attorneys involved in all of the acts enumerated above need to investigated by special prosecutors for criminal charges.

Byron York, writing at the Washington Examiner adds yet more reasons why Sen. Sessions is needed at the DOJ. Senator Sessions is an anti-immigration hawk.  Over the past eight years, Obama did not merely stop enforcing our immigration laws, but between he and his DOJ, they actively subverted the law.  York argues persuasively that, to significantly crack down on illegal immigration, the DOJ does not need new law, it merely needs to begin enforcing the existing laws.

But Senator Sessions is not assured of approval.  The progressive left, with the media in a feeding frenzy and none other than Senator Elizabeth Warren (Indian name, “Pale Face”) leading the charge, is claiming that Sessions is a racist who should not be approved.

All that the progressives have left in their arsenal is a race card that lacks any grounding in today’s reality.  But because identity politics is their only strategy to achieve permanent power, they are playing it for all that it is worth.  Sessions is proving a lightening rod for those allegations now.  For all the problems facing us, virtually all of which would benefit from reasoned debate, we get none of that so long as anyone credits the progressive’s identity politics as having any validity.  If indeed Sessions is not a racist, then it is imperative that the progressives not be afforded the power of the race card to kill his nomination.

This from CNN should give you a flavor of what is to come:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8aqTnmrws&w=560&h=315]

As a threshold matter, there have been no allegations of racism against Jeff Sessions for any actions taken within the past 30 years.  The old allegations of racism arose in a 1986 Senate hearing for a Federal judgeship and were shaky at best.  But just to put this into perspective, the same people trying to make Sessions out to be a racist today are the same people who embraced Robert Byrd, a man who actually was the Exalted Cyclops of a 150 person KKK chapter in West Virginia that he personally organized before later becoming a Democrat Senator.

All of the allegations of racism against Jeff Sessions stem from the period between 1975 and 1987 when he served as a United States Attorney in the Alabama Office.  The allegations consisted of alleged remarks and a claim that he brought an unfounded case of vote fraud against a black politician.  Against those are facts that are uncontested:

As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays. When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.

Those are not the acts of a racially motivated person.  Nonetheless, at his 1986 Senate hearing, four  attorneys made allegations that they had heard him say things that were at worst racially insensitive.  Wikipedia covers them in some detail.  :

. . . [F]our . . . [DOJ] lawyers who had worked with Sessions testified that he made racially offensive remarks. One of those lawyers, J. Gerald Hebert, testified that Sessions had referred to the . . . NAACP and the . . . ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people”.  Hebert, a civil rights lawyer, said that he did not consider Sessions a racist, and that Sessions “has a tendency sometimes to just say something, and I believe these comments were along that vein.”

Thomas Figures, a black Assistant U.S. Attorney, testified that Sessions said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot”. Sessions later said that the comment was not serious, but did apologize for it. Barry Kowalski, a prosecutor in the civil rights division, also heard the remark and testified that he considered it a joke. Kowalski later said that he considered Sessions to have been more welcoming to the work of the Civil Rights Division than many other Southen US Attorneys at the time.  Figures also testified that on one occasion, when the . . . [DOJ] Civil Rights Division sent the office instructions to investigate a case that Sessions had tried to close, Figures and Sessions “had a very spirited discussion regarding how the Hodge case should then be handled; in the course of that argument, Mr. Sessions threw the file on a table, and remarked, ‘I wish I could decline on all of them,'” by which Figures said Sessions meant civil rights cases generally. . . .

[Sessions has] denied that he had not sufficiently pursued civil rights cases, saying that “when I was [a U.S. Attorney], I signed 10 pleadings attacking segregation . . . where we as part of the Department of Justice, we sought desegregation remedies”.

Figures also said that Sessions had called him “boy,” which Sessions denied. Figures also testified that two assistant prosecutors had also heard Sessions, including current federal judge Ginny Granade.  Granade denied this. He also testified that “Mr. Sessions admonished me to ‘be careful what you say to white folks.'” In 1992, Figures was indicted by a federal grand jury with attempting to bribe a witness by offering a $50,000 to a convicted drug dealer who was to testify against his client. Figures claimed the indictment was in retaliation for his role in blocking Sessions nomination. Sessions was also reported to have called a white civil rights attorney a “disgrace to his race.”

Sessions responded to the testimony by denying the allegations, saying his remarks were taken out of context or meant in jest, and also stating that groups could be considered un-American when “they involve themselves in un-American positions” on foreign policy. Sessions said during testimony that he considered the Klan to be “a force for hatred and bigotry.” In regards to the marijuana quote, Sessions said the comment was a joke but apologized

Figueres is not the only one with ethical problems.  The other main accuser of Sessions, Mr. Hebert actually does have a documented history of prosecuting trumped up allegations of racism.  J. Christian Adams has the story here.

There is one other piece to the puzzle — Sessions prosecution of Albert Turner for vote fraud.  This also from Wikipedia, citing an article in the The New Republic (so take it with a grain of salt):

In 1985, Sessions prosecuted three African American community organizers in the Black belt of Alabama, including Martin Luther King Jr’s former aide Albert Turner, for voter fraud. The prosecution stirred charges of selective prosecution of Black voter registration and was based on no more than 14 tampered ballots. The defendants, known as the Marion Three, were quickly acquitted.

The way this was played in the press at the time, such as this 1986 NBC News Report, was that the charge was frivolous.  It is utterly contemptible that NBC would run the clip of those claiming that the evidence was without any merit without actually looking at the evidence.  I will note that the Judge in the case apparently felt there was sufficient evidence to allow the jury to decide instead of directing a verdict, and there is no evidence that Mr. Turner filed any sort of suit against Jeff Sessions for wrongful prosecution in the wake of his not guilty verdict.

On the basis of such evidence, the duo of Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, the two men almost wholly responsible for politicizing the Supreme Court, claimed Sessions’s as their first scalp at the 1986 hearing.  That was the year before they turned the name of Robert Bork into a verb.  And given the weakness of the above evidence, it would indeed be a second Borking were the current Senate be able to prevent Sen. Sessions from taking the AG spot.