Donald Trump’s nominee for US attorney general has been accused of bringing criminal prosecutions against a pair of black officials in Alabama as retaliation for their roles in derailing his nomination to be a judge.

The officials faced federal corruption charges in the southern district of Alabama, where Jeff Sessions was the top federal prosecutor, after their allegations of racism caused the US Senate to deny Sessions the judicial appointment in 1986.



“Sessions decided to go after me because he didn’t get the federal judgeship,” said Douglas Wicks, a former Mobile County commissioner. Wicks spent more than five years in prison after being convicted on charges that were brought by Sessions a few months after he was accused of calling Wicks a “nigger”.



Thomas Figures, a black senior prosecutor who served under Sessions in the US attorney’s office, was also later indicted on federal corruption charges. He had told senators that Sessions called him “boy” and instructed him to be careful what he said to white people.



Figures and his supporters claimed that he, too, was a victim of retaliation over the failed Sessions judgeship nomination. Sessions said at the time that he had recused himself from the case. Figures was eventually cleared by a jury of all charges.



“It was a shakedown,” Figures, who died last year, said while testifying at his trial. His late brother, Alabama state senator Michael Figures, said at the time: “The government set out to entrap my brother.”



A spokeswoman for Sessions did not respond to a request for comment, although he denied Figures’s accusation at the time.

Sessions has also denied the two men’s accusations that he used racist language, although in the case of Wicks he gave a false explanation to the US Senate when testifying about the allegation.



After a series of incendiary hearings in which they were told of the alleged remarks involving Wicks, Figures and other African Americans, the US Senate judiciary committee voted in June 1986 to reject Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Sessions to the southern Alabama judgeship.

Sessions went on to be Alabama’s attorney general and has been a US senator for the state since 1997. His nomination by Trump to be the nation’s most senior law enforcement official has reopened a decades-long dispute about his racial views.



Jeff Sessions speaks to the media at Trump Tower. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Another key witness who testified in the Sessions confirmation hearings said he was threatened by two senior Republicans shortly before he presented damning evidence to the committee.



J Gerald Hebert, a senior civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice, said in sworn testimony to the Senate that Sessions had described a white attorney as “maybe” a “disgrace to his race” for working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).



Hebert, who had worked on voting rights cases in Mobile, recalled that Sessions dismissed advocacy organisations such as the ACLU, NAACP and the National Council of Churches as “un-American” because “they shove civil rights down the throats of people trying to solve problems on their own”. Sessions did not deny these claims.

Hebert also said that shortly before he was due to testify he was “escorted into a back room” and told to lie by the Republican Alabama senator Jeremiah Denton, a close ally to Sessions, and a senior aide to South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist and judiciary committee’s chairman.



“I remember specifically that [Denton] threatened my job,” said Hebert, who is now director of voting rights and redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center. “He said that I’d better get out there and straighten up this nomination, or else I might find myself packing my bags when I got back to the justice department.”



Hebert did not change his evidence, and said he signed an affidavit immediately after the hearing that documented the attempt to suppress his account.



Thurmond and Denton went on to vote for Sessions but the committee split 10-8 against the confirmation. Sessions later described Denton as a “friend, warrior, leader, and hero” following the former senator’s death in 2014.



Four months after the Senate blocked the nomination, Sessions indicted Wicks, the black Mobile official he had allegedly slurred, on extortion charges. The indictment was publicly unveiled by Sessions two days after the Senate confirmed attorney Alex Howard to take the judgeship that Sessions had been denied.



He said that I’d better get out there and straighten up this nomination, or else I might find myself packing my bags J Gerald Hebert

“The only reason I’ve been indicted is because Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was not confirmed as a federal judge,” Wicks told an Associated Press reporter that day.

Wicks was accused of taking $3,000 from a businessman who was seeking a waste haulage contract from the county. He recalled that the businessman was sent into his office by the FBI, who worked closely with Sessions, wearing a wire, and recorded Wicks saying that he welcomed campaign contributions.



Sessions claimed when prosecuting Wicks that the businessman had then left an envelope full of cash in Wicks’s office, according to Wicks. But Wicks insisted that he never saw the envelope, and that the money was never recovered.



Wicks pleaded not guilty, but was convicted in 1987. After resigning from the county commission, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Then aged 39, he broke down in tears in the courtroom and maintained that he had done nothing wrong. He was eventually released after serving five and a half years, he said.



Official records of the case were not immediately available from the federal court or the US attorney’s office.



Wicks, now 69, said that in addition to the “nigger” allegation, Sessions was angered by Wicks refusing to publicly endorse his judicial nomination. He said that Jim Mason, a Republican county commissioner, had approached him seeking a signature for an open letter of support for Sessions’s nomination.



“I told him I couldn’t support Sessions because of his racial stance,” said Wicks. “He was after blacks. That’s the long and the short of it. I was the first and only one in county office at the time.”

Figures, the senior black prosecutor whose explosive allegations about Sessions dominated the ill-fated Senate hearings, was indicted in November 1992 as Sessions came to the end of his tenure as US attorney.

Figures, who had been Alabama’s first black federal prosecutor, was indicted on charges of trying to bribe a witness in a criminal case. A secret recording was again at the heart of the indictment against him.

Jeff Sessions speaks at a campaign rally with Donald Trump in Madison, Alabama. Photograph: Marvin Gentry/Reuters

In 1990, having departed Sessions’ office and returned to private practice, Figures was defending a civil rights activist accused of dealing crack cocaine. A convicted drug dealer, John Christopher, was expected to testify against Figures’ client.



Figures went to see Christopher in jail, unaware that Christopher was cooperating with federal authorities in the hope of reducing his sentence, and was wearing a wire. During their conversation, Christopher told Figures that it would require a $50,000 bribe to stop him testifying.

The secret recording indicated that Figures went along with the idea. But Figures later testified at his trial in Mobile that he only did this so that he could have Christopher charged with attempted bribery, which would have prevented the drug dealer from giving evidence against his client.

Supporters of Figures were adamant that he was the victim of revenge because of his role in denying Sessions the judgeship. Sessions denied this. “I’m sorry people see it that way,” Sessions told a reporter at the time. “It is a matter I would like to see behind me, and I’m sorry to see it come up again.”

Sessions said that he had recused himself from the case due to his history with Figures, and that it had been handled by justice department officials in Washington DC.



Figures, who faced a potential 15-year prison sentence and $250,000 fine if convicted, was acquitted of bribery and of witness tampering in March 1993. Having cleared his name, he went on to serve as municipal judge for the city of Mobile. He died in January 2015.

Al Stokes, Figures’s lifelong best friend and a former chief of staff in the Mobile mayor’s office, said Figures always felt he had been “dealt with in a retaliatory manner” because of his statements to the Senate.

“He said it was because he had been so public regarding his concerns about Senator Sessions, and that he had gone to Congress to testify about him,” said Stokes.