Donald Trump's attorney general pick Jeff Sessions was deemed too racist to be a federal judge

Donald Trump is poised to appoint a man as his Attorney General who has been dogged by claims of racism and bigotry throughout his career.

The President-elect has already named Steve Bannon, who is hailed by white supremacists, and Michael Flynn, who has backed some of the US’s most notorious anti-Muslim activists, to his transition team.

But it looks like he is about to make his most controversial appointment yet.

Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, was nominated to the Attorney General role in November, and was poised to be questioned on Tuesday by senators in Washington — who will judge his suitability for the role.

Mr Sessions was denied a federal judge role 30 years ago due to allegations of racial discrimination, making him only the second person in 50 years to have his appointment blocked by the Senate.

Before denying him the role, the Senate Judiciary Committee had heard several allegations accusing Mr Sessions of racism.

In one instance, the Republican was said to have dismissed organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the ACLU as “un-American” and suggested a white civil rights attorney was a race traitor for taking on a voting rights case in Alabama during the 1980s.

In a separate incident, he referred to a black local government official as “the n*****”, while senators also heard that Mr Sessions had called a black official in his office “boy” and instructed him to be careful what he said to white people.

Mr Sessions denied the allegations of racism throughout the process, telling the committee: “I deny as strongly as I can express it that I am insensitive to the concerns of blacks.”

Mr Sessions has opposed nearly every immigration bill that has come before the Senate in the past two decades that has included a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. He has also fought legal immigration, including guest worker programmes for illegal immigrants and visa programmes for foreign workers in science, math and high-tech.

In 2007, he got a bill passed essentially banning for 10 years federal contractors who hire illegal immigrants.

More recently, Mr Sessions has courted controversy by attacking the Black Lives Matter protest movement, which he called “really radical” and blamed for a spike in violent crime in some US cities.

The selection of the long-standing supporter of Mr Trump has been met with criticism from numerous professionals and campaign groups.

Last week, a group of more than 1,100 law school professors from across the US sent a letter to Congress urging the Senate to reject Mr Sessions' appointment.

The letter, signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, including prominent legal scholars including Laurence H Tribe of Harvard Law School and Geoffrey R Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, stated: “We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States.

“Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”

In another open letter, signed by 200 campaign groups, the Leadership Conference on Human Rights wrote: “Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”

The Senate is required to approve a president’s major appointments, but the Democrats – with a minority – will not have the power to block any of Mr Trump’s picks if Mr Sessions has full Republican support.

With Mr Sessions having formed relationships with colleagues in the upper chamber over the last 20 years, he is likely to be approved.