The Senate confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, has been marred by interruptions and heckling.
Two men wearing costumes of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), the white supremacist organization with a history of fatal racist attacks on people of colour, were ejected from the building on Tuesday as they disrupted the hearing.
Security removed them from the room, as they yelled mockingly, "you can't arrest me, I am white!" and "white people own this government".
Civil liberties advocates have seized on Sessions' voting record and his appearances before groups that espouse anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views.
He was rejected for a federal judgeship by the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago amid accusations of racism.
In a prepared opening statement, Sessions says he understands "the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters".
In 2005, attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions refused to believe that the U.S. was “systematically abusing prisoners” at Guantanamo Bay.
— ACLU National (@ACLU) January 10, 2017
During a 1994 campaign for Alabam attorney general, Sessions came out in support of chain gangsforced labour of prisonersand life sentences for children as young as 14 years old, the progressive Mother Jones news site reports.
Sessions has also accused the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (NAACP) civil rights group and the American Civil Liberties Union of being "un-American", according to J Gerald Hebert, a former justice department civil rights attorney who worked with Sessions in Alabama.
Speaking in New York City on Monday, Trump described Sessions as a "high-quality man".
John Kerry, the outgoing US secretary of state, said on Tuesday there has been little contact between officials of the Department of State and Trump's transition team.
Asked about the transition process at a forum in Washington on Tuesday, Kerry said: "It's going pretty smoothly because there's not an enormous amount of it."
Kerry said he had not yet met the man Trump has picked to take over as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, but expected to do so soon.
Aljazeera