On Tuesday, the United States Senate confirmed one of Joe Biden’s most controversial federal nominees, Kristen Clarke, to a key leadership post in the Department of Justice, as reported by the Daily Caller.
Clarke was confirmed as head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division with 51 votes, when Republican Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) sided with the chamber’s 50 Democrats to confirm her nomination. As previously reported, her nomination originally stalled in the Judiciary Committee after the committee vote to advance her nomination ended in a tie, before Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) brought the motion to a full floor vote to advance it out of the committee.
Clarke came under heavy scrutiny from Republicans after it was revealed that she had written multiple essays during her time in college that included outright racist statements. She wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson, under her capacity as President of the Black Studies Association, in which she explicitly and falsely claimed that “melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities” than White people.
While at Columbia University, she formally endorsed an essay titled “Munia, Lynch Law, and Imperialism,” which explicitly claimed that “The [Ku Klux] Klan is now the police, with blue uniforms replacing the sheets and hoods. The corrupt racist judges are petty Klan administrators.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) described Clarke as “one of the most radical nominees ever put forward for any position in the federal government,” while Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said that “every cop in America should be terrified that the Department of Justice is going to jump to a conclusion when they have to make a split second decision to defend themselves or to defend innocent, law-abiding citizens.”
Senate Democrats, ignoring the criticisms, took to Twitter to celebrate her confirmation for the simple reason that Clarke is “the first black woman to hold this role,” while also falsely describing her as “eminently qualified and the ideal person to advance our civil rights and restore credibility at the Division.”