WASHINGTON The man who President-elect Donald Trump will nominate as the 84th attorney general of the United States was once rejected as a federal judge over allegations he called a black attorney boy, suggested a white lawyer working for black clients was a race traitor, joked that the only issue he had with the Ku Klux Klan was their drug use, and referred to civil rights groups as un-American organizations trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), an early Trump supporter who has been playing a major role on the Trump transition team, met with the president-elect in New York on Thursday. In a statement, the Trump team said the president-elect was unbelievably impressed with Sessions.

On Friday morning, Trump and Sessions confirmed that Sessions had been offered the attorney general position.

J. Gerald Hebert remembers Sessions time as the top federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama, well. Speaking to The Huffington Post earlier this month, Hebert said he was stunned that an Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a possibility.

More than three decades ago, Hebert was in his 30s and working on voting rights cases for the Department of Justices Civil Rights Division. He was based in D.C. but spent time in Alabama working with Sessions, who was a U.S. attorney in Ronald Reagans administration.

He was very affable, always wanting to have a conversation, a cup of coffee, Hebert said. Over the course of those months, I had a number of conversations with him, and in a number of those conversations he made remarks that were deeply concerning.

After Sessions was nominated to be a federal judge in 1986, Hebert appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about these remarks. It was unusual for a career DOJ lawyer to testify about a judicial nominees character, and Hebert said at the time that he did so with very mixed feelings, telling senators he considered Sessions a friend. Hebert told them Sessions had a tendency to pop off and that he was not a very sensitive person when it comes to race relations.

HuffPost reviewed a transcript of the Sessions 1986 confirmation hearings. In this selection, Hebert testified that he had once relayed comments about a white lawyer being described as a race traitor, and that Sessions had responded by saying he probably is: