People, especially those from Hawaii, were not amused. Lawmakers from the state (the 50th in the union, to be exact) called out the nation's top law enforcement official on Twitter, one likening his comments to “dog whistle politics.”

On social media, users criticized Sessions for seeming to belittle Hawaii by tweeting facts about the state using the hashtag #IslandinthePacific. In a column, The Washington Post's Gene Park blasted Sessions's comments as “peak colonialism.” The New York Times published a primer: “What Is Hawaii?”

AD

AD

“You may have questions about Hawaii,” the Times piece stated. “Many Americans do.”

Less than a week later, Sessions doesn't seem fazed by the uproar over his remarks.

The attorney general appeared Sunday on ABC's “This Week,” where host George Stephanopoulos asked him to respond to the controversy over the remarks. At first, Sessions did not answer directly, instead he started to talk about the lawsuit that had been filed against the executive order.

“Why not just call it the state of Hawaii?” Stephanopoulos pressed.

Sessions chuckled.

“Nobody has a sense of humor anymore,” Sessions said, smiling.

Sessions went on to defend Trump's travel ban, without returning to the Hawaii issue.

AD

“Look. The president has to deal with the Department of Defense, the national intelligence agencies, CIA. He knows the threats to this country. He is responsible for protecting America,” Sessions told Stephanopoulos. “This order is lawful. It's within his authority constitutionally and explicit statutory authority. We're going to defend that order all the way up. And so you do have a situation in which one judge out of 700 in America has stopped this order. “I think it's a mistake. And we're going to battle in the courts, and I think we'll eventually win.”

AD

In the wake of the backlash over Sessions's comments last week, the Justice Department tried to clarify his wording.

“Hawaii is, in fact, an island in the Pacific — a beautiful one where the Attorney General’s granddaughter was born,” Justice Department spokesman Ian D. Prior said in a statement. “The point, however, is that there is a problem when a flawed opinion by a single judge can block the President’s lawful exercise of authority to keep the entire country safe.”

But even that, as many pointed out, was geographically incorrect. Hawaii is an archipelago of eight major islands, one of which is named “Hawaii” — but not the one on which Judge Derrick K. Watson, the federal judge in question, resides. (That is Oahu.)

AD

On Friday, Sessions refused to apologize for his comments in an interview with CNN's Kate Bolduan.

AD

“No, I wasn't criticizing the judge or the island. I think it's a fabulous place,” Sessions told Bolduan, still incorrectly referring to the state as a single island. “I've got a granddaughter born there.”

“Do you wish you had phrased it differently now?” Bolduan asked again a short while later.

“I don't know that I said anything that I would want to phrase differently,” Sessions told Bolduan. “No.”