Sessions likely to bring conservative voice to Justice Dept.

Jeff Sessions, and he will need to be “questioned very carefully” before he is confirmed as the next USA attorney general. “He’s the one person I sought his counsel, because he’s been so spot on. He’s so highly respected”. He has been vehemently opposed to any proposal that could be seen as a “path to citizenship” while in the Senate, even though, as the Huffington Post noted, the man who attended “all-white segregated schools” has belatedly said he regrets not getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement as a younger man.

“He should be brought back from Russian Federation and given due process and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence”, Pompeo said.

Mr Sessions has said he is against giving undocumented immigrants a path to USA citizenship and in favour of reduced spending and a tough approach to fighting crime. Strange, in a letter this month to the committee chairman, said his office was doing “related work” but did not elaborate.

“We must rebuild our legal culture”, Cruz said.

“It is false that marijuana use doesn’t lead people to more drug use”, Sessions said earlier this year.

Sessions and Pompeo seem likely to be confirmed by the Senate despite heavy resistance from Democrats. He withdrew from consideration for a federal judgeship in 1986 after being accused of making racist comments while serving as a US attorney in Alabama.

In making his choice, Trump said Pompeo “will be a brilliant and unrelenting leader for our intelligence community to ensure the safety of Americans and our allies”.

Trump’s nomination is already facing heavy opposition from civil rights organizations.

“This is reactionary”, says Joanne Lin, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sessions has also been a fiery opponent to immigration, waging an all-out assault on the efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform through Congress in 2007 and again in 2013.

Sessions and Pompeo would both require Senate confirmation before assuming their designated roles; Flynn would not.

Mr Sessions, a former prosecutor, was turned down for a federal judgeship in 1986 because of alleged racist remarks.

But charges of racial insensitivity derailed the nomination.

Sessions cheered the 2013 Supreme Court decision that nullified a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and he has, in the past, supported state voter ID laws that critics say disproportionately make voting more hard for African-Americans. “With the support of my Senate colleagues, I will give all my strength to advance the Department’s highest ideals”.

In Trump, Sessions saw someone strong enough to smash the system in Washington that he says caters to big money interests like the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street, particularly on trade and immigration.

In a final plea, he told the committee, “I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create; I am not a racist”. I am not insensitive to blacks.

“But unlike Republicans’ practice of unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s nominees, I believe nominees deserve a full and fair process before the Senate”.

Now, Session sits on the very panel that rejected his nomination to the federal bench. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said it was a mistake. “Sessions is egalitarian”, Specter said in 2009, when Sessions assumed the position of ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

Pompeo, 52, a third-term Republican congressman from Kansas, was a surprise pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

He also reportedly joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he had thought its members were “OK, until I found out they smoked pot”.

But expect a fight.

Sessions has been one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers on Capitol Hill and the president-elect has hired several of Sessions’ staffers, including policy chief Stephen Miller and Rick Dearborn, who has a top job managing the transition.

“Back then Sessions” problems began with a 1984 case known as the Marion 3, in which he prosecuted three civil rights workers over what he perceived as voting fraud.

This week, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, pledged to register as a Muslim if Trump were to institute a national database of Muslims, something he proposed during the campaign.