US: Trump chooses senior senator for Attorney General

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) – President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday he will nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions to lead the Justice Department.

“It is an honor to nominate U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions to serve as Attorney General of the United States," the Trump said in a statement.

Sessions was one of the first lawmakers to publicly back Trump for president. He has spent more than 15 years in the senate, and prior to that was Alabama's attorney general and a U.S. attorney.

He said in the same statement that he is "humbled" to have been chosen.

"I will give all my strength to advance the Department's highest ideals," he said.

But the Alabama senator has been dogged by allegations of racism throughout his career.

When he was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan to be a federal judge in 1986 his colleagues testified that Sessions had used a highly pejorative word for blacks in their presence.

And another witness said Sessions told him he was fine with the Ku Klux Klan, except for their use of drugs.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that fights hate crimes, said in a statement that while Sessions was helpful in a case they worked on in the early 1980s, they could not support his nomination.

"Senator Sessions not only has been a leading opponent of sensible, comprehensive immigration reform, he has associated with anti-immigrant groups we consider to be deeply racist, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Security Policy," the group said.