With his choice for Attorney General facing a growing backlash on Capitol Hill, President-elect Donald Trump is circling the wagons in defense of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. On Sunday, Team Trump issued a press release declaring, "Civil rights and law enforcement groups are strongly supporting Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General." Near the top of the list of those seeking to deflect charges of racism and anti-gay and anti-immigrant bias is former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft. The one-time Missouri Governor and Senator denounced the criticism of Sessions this way:
"The political 'drive-by-assassins' who have trotted out the 30-year-old fabrication of racism are utterly devoid of the truth. When attackers resort to 30-year-old falsehoods it is clear evidence of their lack of substantive objection.
"Jeff is devoted to the proposition that equity before the law and in our society is at the heart and soul of what it means to be American. Nothing so completely rivals the injustice of racism more profoundly than the reckless labelling of persons who are not.
"Jeff Sessions has earned the trust of America with over three decades of fair and equitable service to the entirety of our culture. He deserves our commendation and support, not conjured, baseless attacks."
Now, it’s no surprise that Trump would turn to a past Republican Attorney General to testify on behalf of the man who would be the next one. But with John Ashcroft, President-elect Trump has also turned to yet another unreconstructed Neo-Confederate to make the case.
You read that right. As Josh Marshall explained in "John Ashcroft’s Rebel Yell" for Slate in December 2000:
In October 1998 Ashcroft gave an interview to the Southern Partisan magazine in which he lashed out at "revisionists" who make malicious attacks on America's founders, such as charging that George Washington was a racist. (The Q & A's introduction praises Ashcroft as a "jealous defender of national sovereignty against the New World Order.") "Your magazine helps set the record straight," said Ashcroft. "You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
Of course, when it comes to perverted agendas, John Ashcroft is an authority.
After losing the 2000 Missouri Senate race to a dead man, Ashcroft was rescued from his embarrassment when George W. Bush selected him to head the Justice Department. There, Ashcroft held daily prayer meetings, moved swiftly to undermine the Freedom of Information Act and, famously, to drape fabric over the uncovered breast of the Spirit of Justice statue. Not content to rest there, AG Ashcroft beclowned himself further, wrongly charging 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick with erecting "a wall" that between the FBI and intelligence agencies that supposedly made the Bush administration’s failure possible. And in June 2002, Ashcroft took terror porn to a new level, grandstanding at a sudden Moscow press conference to wrongly proclaim "we have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive 'dirty bomb.'"
To be sure, Jeff Sessions has his own perverted agenda. Leave aside for the moment the past racial slurs and prosecutorial abuses that prevented him from becoming a federal judge. In 2009, Senator Sessions compared terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay to Club Med tourists and in 2006 defended the Bush administration’s illicit domestic surveillance by the NSA this way:
"Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us."
Like John Ashcroft before him, Jeff Sessions has no place as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. We simply can’t look away precisely because for these two devotees of Dixie, the old times there are not forgotten.