What you need to know about Donald Trump’s new picks

Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s pick to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a hard-line Republican congressman who shares the president-elect’s pugnacious worldview and, like Trump, spent years as a businessman before becoming a politician.

Moreover, Sessions has fought to restrain legal as well as illegal immigration and has opposed special visa programs sought by California’s high-tech industry. While marijuana arrests are down overall, prosecutors are still pursuing marijuana cases, although the Department of Justice focuses on priorities like distribution to minors, money laundering and growing on federal land.

In a foreshadowing of the endorsement that would come later, Sessions joined Trump on stage in his hometown Mobile, donning a “Make America Great” baseball cap. Civil rights groups slammed Sessions as a poor choice to head a department charged with protecting voting rights and running immigration courts. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet began taking shape yesterday, with three conservative stalwarts named to fill key national security and judicial posts – nominations predictably hailed on the right and condemned by Democrats.

Eric Altieri, the executive director of NORML, a nonprofit that has been pushing to make weed legal since 1970, described Sessions as an “anti-marijuana zealot’ in a blog post on the organization’s website because the senator has linked cannabis use to abuse of more risky drugs like cocaine and heroin”.

Former Republican Congressman Jo Bonner of Alabama says senators won’t be swayed by what he calls a “character assassination” from the past.

According to transcripts of the hearings, Mr Sessions was also accused of saying that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was OK until he learned they smoked marijuana.

Pompeo also has fought against Obama’s attempts to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and opposed moving prisoners to the USA, including Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. “Senator Sessions is committed to immigration reform that serves the national interest – not the special interests – and that curbs the unprecedented flow of immigration that is sapping the wages and job prospects of those living and working here today”. “But ultimately the opportunity to lead the world’s finest intelligence warriors, who labor tirelessly to keep this nation and Kansas safe, is a call to service I can not ignore”, Pompeo said.

But Sessions made so many damaging admissions at his March hearing that Republicans called a second round of hearings in May, and at that second hearing, his answers changed so significantly that he faced credibility questions. The first Senator to back Trump, Sessions was tapped to be Attorney General of the United States.

And in a speech on the Senate floor earlier this year, Sessions criticized President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on marijuana, saying the USA could be at the beginning of “another surge in drug use like we saw in the ’60s and ’70s”. The two men were later arrested and convicted.

She said in a statement, “Nominating an Attorney General who that has supported racism and discrimination throughout his career is not what that looks like”.

If Sessions is confirmed as attorney general by the Senate, he would be the country’s top prosecutor and law enforcement official.

She calls Sessions the most anti-immigrant voice in Congress. He may also elevate voter fraud as a priority, something the current Justice Department leaders see as negligible. The choice was applauded by the top Republican in the Senate but drew sharp criticism from civil rights activists. Albert Turner, who helped Martin Luther King register black voters in the 1960s, faced over 100 years in jail for the crime of helping black people vote.

“We need all hands on deck”, Cruz said, and noted that numerous lawyers in the room might land in the new administration. And in the area of gay rights, the administration chose not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in 2011, a federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. “Regrettably, it is likely to be exercised toward the attempted elimination of civil rights, environmental, and antitrust enforcement”.

During a 2013 Senate debate on a so-called federal shield law (giving journalists the protections already operative in most states) Sessions was an outspoken opponent, declaring, “This legislation, in effect, says we are going to create a legal mechanism to protect anyone who is going to call himself a newsperson”.