The announcements came as Trump is weighing his choices for two of the Cabinet’s highest- profile posts: secretary of state and secretary of defense. He retreated Friday afternoon to his golf club at Bedminster, N.J., where he intends to spend the weekend with working sessions with his staff and visitors, including 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Sessions, 69, was Trump’s first endorser in the Senate and quickly became an influential policy adviser to the GOP nominee. He consistently defended Trump, including after an “Access Hollywood” video showed Trump bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. Sessions argued that Trump’s comments did not describe sexual assault.
Sessions has been dogged by accusations of racism throughout his career. In 1986, he was denied a federal judgeship after former colleagues testified before a Senate committee that he joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.”
The NAACP wrote in a Twitter message that Sessions’s nomination is “deeply troubling, and supports an old, ugly history where Civil Rights were not regarded as core American values.”
Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., said in a statement, “If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man.”
Senate Republican leaders rallied to Sessions’s defense and said they intended to approve his nomination to lead the Justice Department and serve as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
In a statement, Trump heaped praise on his nominee, celebrating Sessions’s “world-class legal mind” and noting his tenure in Alabama as U.S. attorney and state attorney general. “Jeff is greatly admired by legal scholars and virtually everyone who knows him,” Trump said.
Sessions said in a statement that there was “no greater honor” than to lead the Justice Department.
“I enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law,” Sessions said. “I look forward to fulfilling my duties with an unwavering dedication to fairness and impartiality.”
Because of Senate filibuster rule changes, Democrats’ options to derail Sessions’s nomination are limited. To be confirmed, Sessions would need a simple majority in the Republican-controlled chamber.
