The current administration of George W. Bush also has pulled the attorney general into controversial matters stemming from the White House’s aggressive effort to combat terrorist threats against the country (see Controversies).
Gonzales Hospital Episode Detailed
(by Dan Eggen and Paul Kane, Washington Post)
US Attorneys Scandal Forces Attorney General to Accept Changes
Leahy Seeks Details Of No-Bid Contracts, Directed To Be Awarded By Justice Department Official
(Leahy Press Release)
Secy of State Powell Memo Opposing Geneva Convention Decision
(PDF)
Biographies of All Attorney Generals
Continuing to load his new administration with ultra-conservatives loyal to him, President-elect Donald Trump stated his intention to nominate Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-Alabama) to serve as attorney general. The first Senator to endorse Trump for president, at a time when many party leaders were denouncing him for racist comments, Sessions was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 for a federal judgeship because of allegations of racist behavior. Next year, that same committee will have to confirm his appointment to head the Department of Justice.
Born in Selma, Alabama, on December 24, 1946, to Jefferson B. Sessions, Jr., who owned a country store and a farm equipment dealership, and the former Abbie Powe, Sessions grew up near Hybart, Alabama, in Wilcox County. Located in the “black belt,” Wilcox was the state’s poorest county, a place where white power was so entrenched that African Americans constituted 77.9% of the population but not a single one was registered to vote.
According to a desegregation lawsuit filed in 1965, Jim Crow shaped Wilcox’s separate but unequal school system as well. Despite the widespread poverty, Wilcox was able to provide a quality education to white students like Sessions because of segregation. Wilcox spent five times more per white pupil as per black pupil, and black schools lacked central heating, indoor plumbing, regular maintenance, or up to date instructional materials, all of which white schools, like Wilcox Central High School, had. Sessions graduated Wilcox Central in 1965.
Growing up in a pro-segregation household during the Civil Rights Movement, Sessions was 16 years old when Alabama Gov. George Wallace infamously pledged “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” in 1963, and 18 when the movement came to Wilcox in the form of voter registration drives and the case against the county school system. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Wilcox County several times to assist in the fight. White resisters beat and killed civil rights activists, and even led an armed assault on a leading black church in July 1965.
After graduating high school, Sessions attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, a private Methodist-supported school that was also for whites only, earning a B.A. in 1969. He was active in the Young Republicans at a time when some Southern whites were just beginning to switch to the GOP in response to Democratic support for civil rights, and was student body president. Sessions attended the University of Alabama School of Law, which in 1969 finally admitted its first black student, and graduated with his J.D. in 1973.
Although Sessions entered private practice in Russellville and later in Mobile, where he has lived since the 1970s, he has spent most of his career working for the government. He served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1975 to 1977 and as U.S. Attorney for the same district from 1981 to 1993. He also served in the Army Reserve in the 1970s with the rank of captain.
Nominated in 1986 for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan, Sessions failed to persuade the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee to send his nomination to the floor for a vote because of allegations of racist statements and behavior.
According to sworn testimony, Sessions called a black attorney, Thomas Figures, who worked for him “boy,” and admonished him to “be careful what you say to white folks.” Sessions also stated that the ACLU and NAACP were “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people,” but joked that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” Sessions denied using the term “boy” and being a racist, and defended the other comments, but testimony about his prosecution of the “Marion Three” just a year before doomed his chances.
In 1985, Sessions charged three civil rights workers—including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who led the mule wagon that carried King’s body through the streets of Atlanta in 1968—with voter fraud, for allegedly tampering with 14 absentee ballots. The three had been working in Alabama’s “Black Belt” counties, where black voter registration drives were beginning to bear fruit. Sessions’ decision to focus on these counties to the exclusion of others was criticized by civil rights advocates, who charged that Sessions was scrutinizing the black community, but overlooking similar violations among whites. Worst of all, the case was weak: the judge dismissed more than half of the charges for lack of evidence, and the jury took only three hours to acquit the defendants on the remainder.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, despite its Republican majority, rejected Sessions’ nomination by a vote of 10-8, only the second time that had happened in 48 years.
In 1993, seven years after the derailment of his judicial nomination, Sessions resigned as U.S. Attorney in order to allow the incoming Clinton administration to select a successor. Just two years later, Sessions was elected Alabama attorney general in 1995, serving in that post for just two years before winning election to the U.S. Senate—and subsequently a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
Sessions has been one of the Senate’s most conservative members. On every issue he will encounter as attorney general, he takes a far-right position. On immigration, for example, Sessions not only opposes a path for citizenship for undocumented residents, he wants to restrict legal immigration as well. He has opposed special visa programs sought for Silicon Valley and, in a May 2006 speech in the Senate, said, “Almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us.”
Sessions opposes any civil rights protections for gay or transgender Americans, earning a 0 rating from the Human Rights Campaign. He voted for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted against expanding hate crimes to include crimes against homosexuals.
Sessions is also anti-choice, and was one of only 37 Senators to vote against embryonic stem cell research, and one of only 22 who opposed the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization in 2013.
He strongly opposes the legalization of marijuana for any reason, stating that pot “is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it is not funny, it’s not something to laugh about...and good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He believes that marijuana is more dangerous that alcohol and that marijuana use leads to the abuse of other drugs.
Sessions has been a strong supporter of government surveillance methods and voted against the USA Freedom Act of 2015 that restricted the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers.
Although Sessions voted to confirm President Barack Obama’s choice of Eric Holder as attorney general, he voted against Holder’s replacement, Loretta Lynch.
Sessions and his wife, Mary, have two daughters and one son and seven granddaughters and three grandsons.
-Matt Bewig
To Learn More:
Trump picks Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general (by Del Quentin Wilber and Lisa Mascaro, Los Angeles Times)
Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General, Could Overhaul Department He’s Skewered (by Eric Lichtblau, New York Times)
What they are saying about Jeff Sessions back home (by John Sharp, Alabama.com)
United States v. Wilcox County (Ala.) Board of Education, 494 F.2d 575 (5th Cir. 1974)
United States v. Wilcox County (Ala.) Board of Education (DOJ Trial Brief, 1966).
Transcript of Senate Hearings on Judicial Nomination of Jefferson Sessions III (1986)
The General Condition of the Alabama Negro (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, 1965).
Bus Ride to Justice (by Fred D. Gray, rev. ed., 2013).
This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight (by Maria Gitin, University of Alabama Press, 2014).
Loretta E. Lynch, a longtime U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was President Barack Obama’s choice to become the 83rd attorney general of the United States, succeeding Eric Holder. She served in that position from April 27, 2015 until January 20, 2017, the date Donald Trump became president.
Lynch was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1959, to Lorenzo and Lorine Lynch and moved with her family to Durham, North Carolina as a child. Her father was a Baptist minister, as was his father. Her mother was a farm worker who became a librarian. Lynch attended a mostly white elementary school, and when she once scored well on an achievement test, school officials made her retake the test because they assumed she had cheated on it. She did as well the second time. Lynch graduated from Durham High School in 1977 and went to Harvard, where she earned a B.A. in English and American Literature in 1981. She remained in Cambridge to attend Harvard Law, receiving her J.D. in 1984. Lynch began her legal career in private practice as a litigation associate for the firm of Cahill Gordon and Reindel in New York.
In 1990, Lynch joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is responsible for prosecuting federal crimes in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and in Nassau County (Long Island). One of her most noteworthy cases was the prosecution of the Green Dragons, a Chinese gang that was convicted of racketeering and murder. Lynch was named chief of the Long Island office in 1993 and served there until 1998, when she was named chief assistant U.S. attorney.
Her most prominent case while there came when she helped prosecute New York City policeman Justin Volpe, who had been among those involved in the 1997 assault and forcible sodomization of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. Midway through his trial in 1999, Volpe pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Later that year, President Bill Clinton appointed Lynch to be U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. She served only two years before being replaced by a George W. Bush appointee in 2001.
Lynch then returned to the private sector, joining the New York firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) as a partner. She focused on commercial litigation, white-collar criminal defense and corporate compliance. In 2003, Lynch was appointed a Federal Reserve director with jurisdiction over the Second Federal Reserve District. She also served in 2005 as an investigator for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and conducted a special investigation into allegations of witness tampering and false testimony at the tribunal.
In 2010, Lynch was again appointed to serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. She led the prosecution for embezzlement of former New York state senate majority leader Pedro Espada Jr. Her office filed charges in 2013 on a $45 million cyberattack on ATMs, made arrests this year in the 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport, dramatized in the movie Goodfellas, and is now prosecuting Rep. Michael Grimm (R-New York) for tax fraud. Despite the indictment, Grimm was easily re-elected to Congress in the 2014 general election.
In 2007 Lynch married Stephen Hargrove, and she has two stepchildren. One of her brothers, Leonzo, followed their father into the ministry, the other, Lorenzo Jr. who died in 2009, served as a Navy Seal.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
The Republican Senate Will Love Loretta Lynch (by Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News)
A Low-Profile Prosecutor (by Sean Gardiner, Wall Street Journal)
The current administration of George W. Bush also has pulled the attorney general into controversial matters stemming from the White House’s aggressive effort to combat terrorist threats against the country (see Controversies).
Gonzales Hospital Episode Detailed
(by Dan Eggen and Paul Kane, Washington Post)
US Attorneys Scandal Forces Attorney General to Accept Changes
Leahy Seeks Details Of No-Bid Contracts, Directed To Be Awarded By Justice Department Official
(Leahy Press Release)
Secy of State Powell Memo Opposing Geneva Convention Decision
(PDF)
Biographies of All Attorney Generals
Continuing to load his new administration with ultra-conservatives loyal to him, President-elect Donald Trump stated his intention to nominate Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-Alabama) to serve as attorney general. The first Senator to endorse Trump for president, at a time when many party leaders were denouncing him for racist comments, Sessions was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 for a federal judgeship because of allegations of racist behavior. Next year, that same committee will have to confirm his appointment to head the Department of Justice.
Born in Selma, Alabama, on December 24, 1946, to Jefferson B. Sessions, Jr., who owned a country store and a farm equipment dealership, and the former Abbie Powe, Sessions grew up near Hybart, Alabama, in Wilcox County. Located in the “black belt,” Wilcox was the state’s poorest county, a place where white power was so entrenched that African Americans constituted 77.9% of the population but not a single one was registered to vote.
According to a desegregation lawsuit filed in 1965, Jim Crow shaped Wilcox’s separate but unequal school system as well. Despite the widespread poverty, Wilcox was able to provide a quality education to white students like Sessions because of segregation. Wilcox spent five times more per white pupil as per black pupil, and black schools lacked central heating, indoor plumbing, regular maintenance, or up to date instructional materials, all of which white schools, like Wilcox Central High School, had. Sessions graduated Wilcox Central in 1965.
Growing up in a pro-segregation household during the Civil Rights Movement, Sessions was 16 years old when Alabama Gov. George Wallace infamously pledged “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” in 1963, and 18 when the movement came to Wilcox in the form of voter registration drives and the case against the county school system. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Wilcox County several times to assist in the fight. White resisters beat and killed civil rights activists, and even led an armed assault on a leading black church in July 1965.
After graduating high school, Sessions attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, a private Methodist-supported school that was also for whites only, earning a B.A. in 1969. He was active in the Young Republicans at a time when some Southern whites were just beginning to switch to the GOP in response to Democratic support for civil rights, and was student body president. Sessions attended the University of Alabama School of Law, which in 1969 finally admitted its first black student, and graduated with his J.D. in 1973.
Although Sessions entered private practice in Russellville and later in Mobile, where he has lived since the 1970s, he has spent most of his career working for the government. He served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1975 to 1977 and as U.S. Attorney for the same district from 1981 to 1993. He also served in the Army Reserve in the 1970s with the rank of captain.
Nominated in 1986 for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan, Sessions failed to persuade the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee to send his nomination to the floor for a vote because of allegations of racist statements and behavior.
According to sworn testimony, Sessions called a black attorney, Thomas Figures, who worked for him “boy,” and admonished him to “be careful what you say to white folks.” Sessions also stated that the ACLU and NAACP were “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people,” but joked that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” Sessions denied using the term “boy” and being a racist, and defended the other comments, but testimony about his prosecution of the “Marion Three” just a year before doomed his chances.
In 1985, Sessions charged three civil rights workers—including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who led the mule wagon that carried King’s body through the streets of Atlanta in 1968—with voter fraud, for allegedly tampering with 14 absentee ballots. The three had been working in Alabama’s “Black Belt” counties, where black voter registration drives were beginning to bear fruit. Sessions’ decision to focus on these counties to the exclusion of others was criticized by civil rights advocates, who charged that Sessions was scrutinizing the black community, but overlooking similar violations among whites. Worst of all, the case was weak: the judge dismissed more than half of the charges for lack of evidence, and the jury took only three hours to acquit the defendants on the remainder.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, despite its Republican majority, rejected Sessions’ nomination by a vote of 10-8, only the second time that had happened in 48 years.
In 1993, seven years after the derailment of his judicial nomination, Sessions resigned as U.S. Attorney in order to allow the incoming Clinton administration to select a successor. Just two years later, Sessions was elected Alabama attorney general in 1995, serving in that post for just two years before winning election to the U.S. Senate—and subsequently a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
Sessions has been one of the Senate’s most conservative members. On every issue he will encounter as attorney general, he takes a far-right position. On immigration, for example, Sessions not only opposes a path for citizenship for undocumented residents, he wants to restrict legal immigration as well. He has opposed special visa programs sought for Silicon Valley and, in a May 2006 speech in the Senate, said, “Almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us.”
Sessions opposes any civil rights protections for gay or transgender Americans, earning a 0 rating from the Human Rights Campaign. He voted for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted against expanding hate crimes to include crimes against homosexuals.
Sessions is also anti-choice, and was one of only 37 Senators to vote against embryonic stem cell research, and one of only 22 who opposed the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization in 2013.
He strongly opposes the legalization of marijuana for any reason, stating that pot “is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it is not funny, it’s not something to laugh about...and good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He believes that marijuana is more dangerous that alcohol and that marijuana use leads to the abuse of other drugs.
Sessions has been a strong supporter of government surveillance methods and voted against the USA Freedom Act of 2015 that restricted the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers.
Although Sessions voted to confirm President Barack Obama’s choice of Eric Holder as attorney general, he voted against Holder’s replacement, Loretta Lynch.
Sessions and his wife, Mary, have two daughters and one son and seven granddaughters and three grandsons.
-Matt Bewig
To Learn More:
Trump picks Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general (by Del Quentin Wilber and Lisa Mascaro, Los Angeles Times)
Jeff Sessions, as Attorney General, Could Overhaul Department He’s Skewered (by Eric Lichtblau, New York Times)
What they are saying about Jeff Sessions back home (by John Sharp, Alabama.com)
United States v. Wilcox County (Ala.) Board of Education, 494 F.2d 575 (5th Cir. 1974)
United States v. Wilcox County (Ala.) Board of Education (DOJ Trial Brief, 1966).
Transcript of Senate Hearings on Judicial Nomination of Jefferson Sessions III (1986)
The General Condition of the Alabama Negro (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, 1965).
Bus Ride to Justice (by Fred D. Gray, rev. ed., 2013).
This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight (by Maria Gitin, University of Alabama Press, 2014).
Loretta E. Lynch, a longtime U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was President Barack Obama’s choice to become the 83rd attorney general of the United States, succeeding Eric Holder. She served in that position from April 27, 2015 until January 20, 2017, the date Donald Trump became president.
Lynch was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1959, to Lorenzo and Lorine Lynch and moved with her family to Durham, North Carolina as a child. Her father was a Baptist minister, as was his father. Her mother was a farm worker who became a librarian. Lynch attended a mostly white elementary school, and when she once scored well on an achievement test, school officials made her retake the test because they assumed she had cheated on it. She did as well the second time. Lynch graduated from Durham High School in 1977 and went to Harvard, where she earned a B.A. in English and American Literature in 1981. She remained in Cambridge to attend Harvard Law, receiving her J.D. in 1984. Lynch began her legal career in private practice as a litigation associate for the firm of Cahill Gordon and Reindel in New York.
In 1990, Lynch joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is responsible for prosecuting federal crimes in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and in Nassau County (Long Island). One of her most noteworthy cases was the prosecution of the Green Dragons, a Chinese gang that was convicted of racketeering and murder. Lynch was named chief of the Long Island office in 1993 and served there until 1998, when she was named chief assistant U.S. attorney.
Her most prominent case while there came when she helped prosecute New York City policeman Justin Volpe, who had been among those involved in the 1997 assault and forcible sodomization of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. Midway through his trial in 1999, Volpe pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Later that year, President Bill Clinton appointed Lynch to be U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. She served only two years before being replaced by a George W. Bush appointee in 2001.
Lynch then returned to the private sector, joining the New York firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) as a partner. She focused on commercial litigation, white-collar criminal defense and corporate compliance. In 2003, Lynch was appointed a Federal Reserve director with jurisdiction over the Second Federal Reserve District. She also served in 2005 as an investigator for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and conducted a special investigation into allegations of witness tampering and false testimony at the tribunal.
In 2010, Lynch was again appointed to serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. She led the prosecution for embezzlement of former New York state senate majority leader Pedro Espada Jr. Her office filed charges in 2013 on a $45 million cyberattack on ATMs, made arrests this year in the 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport, dramatized in the movie Goodfellas, and is now prosecuting Rep. Michael Grimm (R-New York) for tax fraud. Despite the indictment, Grimm was easily re-elected to Congress in the 2014 general election.
In 2007 Lynch married Stephen Hargrove, and she has two stepchildren. One of her brothers, Leonzo, followed their father into the ministry, the other, Lorenzo Jr. who died in 2009, served as a Navy Seal.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
The Republican Senate Will Love Loretta Lynch (by Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News)
A Low-Profile Prosecutor (by Sean Gardiner, Wall Street Journal)
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