He said that I’d better get out there and straighten up this nomination, or else I might find myself packing my bags J Gerald Hebert The indictment was publicly unveiled by Sessions two days after the Senate confirmed attorney Alex Howard to take the judgeship that Sessions had been denied. Sessions later described Denton as a “friend, warrior, leader, and hero” following the former senator’s death in 2014.įour months after the Senate blocked the nomination, Sessions indicted Wicks, the black Mobile official he had allegedly slurred, on extortion charges. Thurmond and Denton went on to vote for Sessions but the committee split 10-8 against the confirmation. Hebert did not change his evidence, and said he signed an affidavit immediately after the hearing that documented the attempt to suppress his account. “He said that I’d better get out there and straighten up this nomination, or else I might find myself packing my bags when I got back to the justice department.” “I remember specifically that threatened my job,” said Hebert, who is now director of voting rights and redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center. Hebert also said that shortly before he was due to testify he was “escorted into a back room” and told to lie by the Republican Alabama senator Jeremiah Denton, a close ally to Sessions, and a senior aide to South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist and judiciary committee’s chairman. Hebert, who had worked on voting rights cases in Mobile, recalled that Sessions dismissed advocacy organisations such as the ACLU, NAACP and the National Council of Churches as “un-American” because “they shove civil rights down the throats of people trying to solve problems on their own”. J Gerald Hebert, a senior civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice, said in sworn testimony to the Senate that Sessions had described a white attorney as “maybe” a “disgrace to his race” for working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/APĪnother key witness who testified in the Sessions confirmation hearings said he was threatened by two senior Republicans shortly before he presented damning evidence to the committee. Jeff Sessions speaks to the media at Trump Tower. His nomination by Trump to be the nation’s most senior law enforcement official has reopened a decades-long dispute about his racial views. Sessions went on to be Alabama’s attorney general and has been a US senator for the state since 1997. Sessions has also denied the two men’s accusations that he used racist language, although in the case of Wicks he gave a false explanation to the US Senate when testifying about the allegation.Īfter a series of incendiary hearings in which they were told of the alleged remarks involving Wicks, Figures and other African Americans, the US Senate judiciary committee voted in June 1986 to reject Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Sessions to the southern Alabama judgeship. His late brother, Alabama state senator Michael Figures, said at the time: “The government set out to entrap my brother.”Ī spokeswoman for Sessions did not respond to a request for comment, although he denied Figures’s accusation at the time. “It was a shakedown,” Figures, who died last year, said while testifying at his trial. Figures was eventually cleared by a jury of all charges. Sessions said at the time that he had recused himself from the case. He had told senators that Sessions called him “boy” and instructed him to be careful what he said to white people.įigures and his supporters claimed that he, too, was a victim of retaliation over the failed Sessions judgeship nomination. Thomas Figures, a black senior prosecutor who served under Sessions in the US attorney’s office, was also later indicted on federal corruption charges.
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