As the US attorney in Mobile, Alabama, Jeff Sessions was talking over a case one day in the 1980s with two fellow prosecutors.
It had to do with a young black man who had been kidnapped and brutally murdered by two members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klansmen, Henry Hayes and Tiger Knowles, slit the victim’s throat and hung his body from a tree.
They carried out the attack in retribution for a jury acquitting a black man in the slaying of a white police officer.
As Sessions learned that some members of the Klan had smoked marijuana on the evening of the slaying, he said aloud that he thought the KKK was: "OK until I found out they smoked pot."