DOJ Nominee Seeking Confirmation Tells Senators She ‘Regrets’ Twitter Attacks on Manchin, Murkowski

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President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division told senators in a letter that she regretted the “tone” she took when she attacked two of their colleagues on social media.

“In retrospect, I regret the tone I occasionally took,” Kristen Clarke wrote in the April missive to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The letter was first obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.

Clarke, who is presently in her fourth month of seeking the Senate’s approval for her nomination, was speaking in reference to her criticism of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK). She commented on Twitter in 2017 that a message Manchin wrote in honor of Martin Luther King Day was full of “hollow words” because he voted to confirm Jeff Sessions, former President Donald Trump’s attorney general. And in 2020, she wrote that it was “shameful” Murkowski had voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Clarke notably also said she held regrets about believing Jussie Smollett’s 2019 claim that he had been the victim of a hate crime perpetrated by Trump supporters. She wrote on Twitter in early 2020 that she believed a special prosecutor was “brought in to undermine” Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx.

“Like many others, I fell for Mr. Smollett’s hoax and in retrospect I regret having made that statement,” Clarke wrote. “Hoaxes distract attention away from the real incidents of hate crimes which are a growing threat in our country.”

If confirmed, Clarke would serve as the assistant attorney general responsible for overseeing federal statutes on race and discrimination. She’s been the subject of controversy due to commentary she authored as a Harvard Law School student in 1994, when she wrote that there were “genetic differences between Blacks and Whites.” She has since defended the commentary as “satire.”