Black Belt voter fraud case in Alabama shaped Sen. Jeff Sessions' career
WASHINGTON – Being U.S. Attorney General in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration would be the dream job for Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Eagle Scout from small town Alabama who openly professes his love of the law, his conservative ideology and his intense partisan loyalty.
Trump announced Friday he will nominate Sessions to lead the Department of Justice, an agency in which he worked as a U.S. Attorney in south Alabama for 14 years before entering politics. It is a part of his biography he mentions more frequently than any other.
“Jeff is principled, forthright, and hardworking,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “He cares deeply about his country and the department he will be nominated to lead."
But the road to Senate confirmation will be rough based on the reaction from Democrats and a whole host of civil rights organizations who fear Sessions’ views on immigration, civil rights and criminal justice – many of them dating back to his time before he was in the Senate – will move the Justice Department in a sharply conservative direction after eight years of President Obama.
Among the harshest critiques was from Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who called Sessions “anti-immigrant and anti-civil rights.’’
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“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, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man,’’ Gutierrez said in a statement.
The most important reviews of Sessions’ record, however, will come from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who will decide whether to recommend him to the full Senate for confirmation. Senators traditionally show great deference to their colleagues when they are elevated to positions in the executive branch. And there were no signs Friday that any Senate Republican, even those who opposed Trump, had reservations about the appointment.
Sessions’ Democratic colleagues were signaling that his path to the Justice Department will not go unchallenged.
“Sen. Sessions has served on the Senate Judiciary Committee for many years so he’s well aware of the thorough vetting he’s about to receive,’’ said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary’s ranking Democrat. “And while many of us have worked with Sen. Sessions closely and know him to be a staunch advocate for his beliefs, the process will remain the same: a fair and complete review of the nominee.’’
The confirmation hearings, which could start even before Trump is sworn in Jan. 20, are expected to relive a series of events more than three decades ago in Alabama that had a profound impact on his career.
In 1985, when he was U.S. Attorney in Mobile, Sessions’ office brought indictments over allegations of voter fraud in a number of Black Belt counties, an area in Alabama named for the color of the soil but with a majority black population. In Perry County, Sessions’ office charged three individuals with voting fraud, including Albert Turner, a long-time civil rights activist who advised Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and helped lead the voting rights March in Selma on March 7, 1965, known as "Bloody Sunday" after state troopers and a local posse attacked the protestors.
Prosecutors alleged that Turner, his wife Evelyn, and activist Spencer Hogue altered ballots for a Sept. 1984 primary election.
Robert Turner, Albert’s brother and an attorney in Marion, Ala., said in a phone interview Friday that the defendants – later known as the Marion Three – were trying to assist poor and elderly voters in casting ballots. In some cases, the defendants said they were helping illiterate voters mark their ballots, and only altered ballots when requested.
“There are and there were large numbers of elderly people in Perry County who need assistance,” said Turner, who helped with his brother’s defense. “They couldn’t get to the polls on their own. As a matter of fact, the technical requirements of completing and mailing (the ballots) were not understood.”
Sessions was present at the trial in Selma but left the prosecution in two assistants' hands. He denied the prosecution targeted black voters and said the case stemmed from complaints from local officials. A jury of seven blacks and five whites acquitted the defendants of all charges. The presiding judge threw out more than half of the charges for lack of evidence before the jury received the case.
“I thought that the prosecution was unwarranted and had no merit,” Robert Turner said Friday. “I thought it was deliberately done to dissuade black people from voting. I don’t think he did it for a just cause.”
The case became the first point of controversy when then-President Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship in 1985. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., called the prosecution “very troublesome” and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed to delay his confirmation hearing to allow investigations.
During the hearings in early 1986, prosecutor J. Gerald Hebert testified that when he asked Sessions about allegations a federal judge called attorney James Blacksher, who is white, “a disgrace to his race” for representing black clients, Sessions replied “Well, maybe he is.”
Asked about the remark in 1986, Sessions said, “I do not know why I would have said that, and I certainly do not believe that. The lawyer in question is one of the finest lawyers in the country.” (Blacksher, reached by phone Friday, declined comment.)
Thomas Figures, a former assistant U.S. Attorney, resigned from the office in 1985 in protest over the Perry County prosecution. During Sessions’ confirmation hearings, Figures, who was black, alleged that Sessions had called him “boy.”
Sessions called Figures’ allegation “absolutely untrue.” Figures said two assistant prosecutors overheard the remark, including Ginny Granade. Granade – now a federal judge in Mobile – said in a statement at the time that she never heard Sessions refer to Figures by anything other than his given name.
Granade’s office, citing the judge’s policy of not discussing political or legal matters, declined comment Friday.
Figures, who died in 2015 after serving as a municipal judge in Mobile, also said Sessions said he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK until I found out they smoked pot.” Sessions did not dispute the remark but said it was a joke he did not expect people to take seriously.
The testimony, though, led the Senate Judiciary Committee – then controlled by Republicans – to narrowly reject recommending Sessions’ nomination to the full Senate.
Sessions at the time said it was more important for him “that people not believe these charges of racial prejudice” than receiving a federal judgeship.
“There is no more important issue for our area than racial harmony,” he said at the time. “The fact that this process has suggested that I and my office have acted otherwise is like a nightmare.”
Robert Turner on Friday wouldn’t say directly if Sessions should be attorney general.
“I can’t say that a person never changes,” he said. “But most of the time, people say what they believe, and their actions follow what they believe, and that’s what I judge people by. When you act consistently in accordance with what you say, I know that’s a part of you.”
Sessions left the U.S. Attorney post in 1993 with the arrival of President Bill Clinton, and his political career began. He was not well known outside of Mobile but won a bare-knuckled statewide campaign for Alabama Attorney General in 1994. After defeating the Democratic incumbent, Sessions took over and cleaned house of the Democrat’s appointees who were hired outside the state’s merit system.
“What you’ll see is a Department of Justice run with honor and integrity, and it will probably be run leaner,” said Armand DeKeyser, Sessions’ former Senate chief of staff and close associate for 40 years.
Two years after becoming AG, Sessions cashed in on his newfound statewide popularity and ran for the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin.
The popular Heflin endorsed the Democratic nominee, then state Sen. Roger Bedford, and the seat seemed likely to remain in Democratic hands until Sessions’ team leveled Bedford with last-minute allegations of using state funds to build a water line to his hunting cabin.
Replacing Heflin also had an ironic twist because Heflin was among the Democratic senators who voted against Sessions’ for a federal judgeship 10 years earlier. And Sessions eventually got a seat on the committee that rejected him.
While on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions’ support for Democratic attorney general nominees has been mixed.
Last year, he voted against Loretta Lynch because of her support of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which shielded millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
“The Senate cannot confirm someone to this post who is going to support and advance a scheme that violates our constitution and eviscerates congressional authority,’’ Sessions said then. “Congress makes the laws, not the president—as every school child knows.’’
Sessions’ opposition to Lynch came after he voted to confirm Eric Holder in 2009, despite Holder’s role in then-President Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich in 2001.
“While he made mistakes as deputy attorney general…Mr. Holder comes to the attorney general’s office with an excellent background and states a firm commitment to uphold the rule of law,’’ Sessions said.
“Like those before him, President Obama—who knows Mr. Holder well—should be given reasonable deference in his nomination of executive branch officials, absent some disqualifying factor.’’
Contributing: Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY