President-Elect Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General appeared to have triggered MSNBC host Al Sharpton Sunday, as he took to his show PoliticsNation to bloviate how the Senator is a racist and the GOP is too. “For Americans worried about how Donald Trump will govern, now we know the answer,” he began his show, “A pick that threatens all the work done by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.”
The MSNBC host brought on Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson to confirm his accusations about Sessions being a racist. Almost ironically, Johnson, who once feared the island of Guam would capsize because of too many US troops, compared Jewish settlers in Israel to termites over the summer. According to The Washington Free Beacon, Johnson’s comments came, “while speaking at an event sponsored by an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts of the Jewish state.”
“Well, he has a history of being opposed to the enforcement of the civil rights laws that protect vulnerable people from discrimination, from hate, from violence,” smeared Johnson, “And he's not a man of justice. He's a man of injustice…”
But in reality, Johnson’s claims against Sessions are unfounded when his record is examined, especially since the Senator supported Holder’s nomination by President Barack Obama.
According to The Weekly Standard, “As a U.S. Attorney [Sessions] filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama.” And as a prosecutor he feverishly pursued the death penalty for a member of the Ku Klux Klan who kidnapped and murdered an African-American teenager. “When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions followed through and made sure [the Klansman] was executed,” The Weekly Standard noted.
In the late summer of 2001, Sessions affirmed that he believes that law enforcement did have a racial bias when it came making stops, according to an ABC News report. “I think it is likely that within every department there are some officers who subtly, if not otherwise, are biased in the way they go about enforcing the law. I think that is just life. We know that to be true,” ABC quoted Sessions as saying.
That is an issue near and dear to Sharpton’s own heart. ABC also reported that the Senator had shown support for honoring Rosa Parks and was concerned about housing discrimination against minorities.
But those facts didn’t stop Sharpton from using Klansman David Duke’s praise of Trump to smear Sessions and the GOP, by asking Johnson, “I mean, who are these picks that President-Elect Trump has announced, who is he appealing to here?”
“He's appealing to a dying breed in America, a racist element of our society that does not accept diversity, a bunch of old men, and, quite frankly, some misguided young people who believe that this country should not be the melting pot that it has always been,” Johnson responded, attempting to link the two. The truth of the matter is, if Trump really was energizing a racist base, then why did David Duke get utterly destroyed in his Senate campaign in Louisiana?