President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department civil rights division has locked down her Twitter account as a date for her Senate confirmation hearing remains in limbo.
Kristen Clarke, the nominee, restricted access to her Twitter account at some point after The Daily Caller News Foundation published stories about her tweets.
The DCNF reported earlier this month that in January 2019, Clarke hyped Jussie Smollett’s now-debunked hate crime allegations in posts on Twitter. Clarke also criticized the Chicago police department for seeking access to Smollett’s cell phone.
Clarke has also used Twitter to criticize two of the Senators whose votes will be pivotal to her potential confirmation.
In February 2017, Clarke blasted Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin for voting to confirm Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general.
In response to a tweet in which Manchin, a Democrat, praised Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarke accused Manchin of uttering “hollow words.”
Clarke also called Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski “shameful” for voting last year to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is one of a handful of Biden nominees whose confirmation status remains uncertain because of their controversial remarks.
Republicans have fought aggressively to derail confirmations for Vanita Gupta, the nominee for associate attorney general, and for Colin Kahl, the nominee for under secretary of defense for policy.
Manchin has signaled that he will vote to confirm Gupta, but he has not weighed in on Kahl.
Both Manchin and Murkowski have already derailed confirmation of one Biden nominee, Neera Tanden.
The Biden administration accepted Tanden’s request to remove her nomination as director of the Office of Management and Budget after Manchin and Murkowski signaled that they would not vote to confirm her because of inflammatory remarks she made on social media.
Tanden deleted thousands of tweets shortly before she was nominated to lead OMB. In one tweet that Tanden did not scrub, she criticized Murkowski after the lawmaker said she supported lowering the corporate tax rate.
In addition to her tweets, Clarke has come under fire for racially-charged remarks while a student at Harvard University in 1994. Fox News reported in January that Clarke wrote to the school newspaper that black people have “greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities” than whites.
Clarke’s group did not respond to a request for comment.
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