On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Friday, anchor Andrea Mitchell fretted over Donald Trump nominating Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general: “...this is a difficult time with the civil rights issues front and center at the Justice Department after Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, the Voting Rights Act being somewhat gutted by the Supreme Court, and all of those issues that have been raised.”

Correspondent Peter Alexander sounded the alarm: “I think what’s sort of striking and what Americans need to consider is just what a sweeping change this will be from what the attorney general's office looks like right now. Consider the fact that you had Eric Holder, the first African-American attorney general...making civil rights a priority, tried to rebuild the civil rights division there. Now you’ll have Jeff Sessions...”

He touted accusations that were hurled at Sessions during a confirmation battle in the 1980s, when President Reagan tried to appoint him as a federal judge: “...some of the past comments, the testimony back in 1986, where there was testimony from former colleagues that he referred to organizations like the NAACP and some other civil rights groups as being, quote, ‘un-American and Communist-inspired.’ Back then, an individual said that he said that the KKK was fine until he learned that they smoked pot.”

Alexander wrung his hands: “He is going to be the man now who, in effect, will be in charge of sort of shaping civil rights policy, as far as it goes.” He further lamented: “So, Jeff Sessions, he’s gonna play a huge role on issues that a lot of Americans are focused on as we try to find a more inclusive society for so many.”

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Mitchell quickly added: “And Casa, an Hispanic American group, just put out a statement vociferously against because he’s going to be in charge of deciding what deportation levels. So it’s immigration, it’s deportation. The executive orders, we know, are gonna be cancelled, the Dreamers and all of that.”

In a later interview with Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, Mitchell pressed the Republican representative on Sessions: “We know he had a difficult time and did not get confirmed in 1986. What about those issues then?...Do you think that that will create problems for him if he does get confirmed to be attorney general at a time when we have had a lot of racial conflict in this country?”

At the end of show, Mitchell once again returned to the Sessions appointment and teed up justice correspondent Pete Williams to warn viewers about the Senator’s conservative stances: “He's controversial in some regard. Civil rights, his immigration policy.”

Williams explained:

He departs from the Obama administration in a number of ways. He voted for the confirmation of Eric Holder to be attorney general but against the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, the current attorney general, because he said she spoke in favor of the Obama administration’s executive actions on immigration, which he has described as “lawless.” So he's one of the harshest critics of the President on immigration. He voted against changing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy allowing gay people to serve in the military. He's been an opponent of another big project in the Obama Justice Department, what is called sentencing reform, trying to do away with mandatory minimums. Trying to keep low-level drug offenders from having to serve these long prison sentences that clog up the nation’s prisons. Many of his Republican colleagues have supported that, but he’s been one of the harshest critics of it. He said, “We should not be sending a message that we're going easy on sentencing just at the time of the crime rate going up.”

Here are excerpts from November 18 show: