Sen. Elizabeth Warren suggested Donald Trump's pick showed he was "embracing the bigotry that fueled his campaign rallies." | Getty Warren demands that Trump rescind Sessions pick

Elizabeth Warren on Friday urged President-elect Donald Trump to rescind his nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, arguing that allowing the Alabama senator to lead the Justice Department would be a “compromise with racism” and a “negotiation with hate.”

Trump on Friday morning announced the latest appointments to his upcoming administration, tapping Sessions as attorney general, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as a national security adviser and Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA director.


“Instead of embracing the bigotry that fueled his campaign rallies, I urge President-elect Trump to reverse his apparent decision to nominate Senator Sessions to be Attorney General of the United States,” Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “If he refuses, then it will fall to the Senate to exercise fundamental moral leadership for our nation and all of its people.”

Sessions would have to be confirmed in the Senate before he could serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official, though it appears he has enough Republican support to sail through.

In 1986, when the GOP senator was a U.S. attorney, President Ronald Reagan had nominated him for a federal judgeship. But numerous allegations of racism emerged during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which ultimately voted 10-8 against his confirmation. Sessions has always rejected the claims.

“Thirty years ago, a different Republican Senate rejected Senator Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship. In doing so, that Senate affirmed that there can be no compromise with racism; no negotiation with hate,” Warren continued. “Today, a new Republican Senate must decide whether self-interest and political cowardice will prevent them from once again doing what is right.”

In his statement, Trump called it an “honor” to nominate Sessions, adding that the Alabama Republican is “a highly respected” senator, “a world-class legal mind and considered a truly great Attorney General and U.S. Attorney in the state of Alabama.”

“Jeff is greatly admired by legal scholars and virtually everyone who knows him,” Trump said.

Some of those who worked with him tell a different story, though. According to congressional transcripts of Sessions’ confirmation hearings decades ago, a former official within DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and a former assistant U.S. attorney testified that Sessions had referred to the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American” and “communist-inspired” and intimated he was fine with the Ku Klux Klan until he found out some of its members smoked marijuana.

Additional charges include allegations that he agreed a white civil rights lawyer who others had suggested was either a disgrace to his race or a traitor “probably is” and addressed the black assistant U.S. attorney as “boy,” warning him to “be careful what you say to white folks.”

Sessions denied the charges during his testimony.

Earlier this week, Warren railed against another Trump appointee: Steve Bannon, whom Trump tapped as a top White House official Sunday.

“He has brought Steve Bannon in as a senior strategist,” she said Tuesday morning at a Wall Street Journal event with CEOs. “This is a man who has white supremacist ties. I mean, that’s what he does. This is a man who told his ex-wife that he didn’t want his children going to school with Jews. This is a man who ran a news organization that ran headlines like, ‘Would you rather your children have feminism or cancer?’ This is a man who says by his very presence that this is a White House that will embrace bigotry.”