The legend of the 1986 hearings lives on every time a media organization or a Democrat refers to Sessions speaking favorably of the KKK. The Sessions statement came in the course of an investigation into a hideous Klan murder of a black man whose throat was slit and corpse hung from a tree.

Barry Kowalski was a trial lawyer from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department at the time. He recalled in 1986 Senate testimony that he was explaining to Sessions how it was difficult to nail down what the Klansmen were doing one night because they had smoked marijuana and their memories were fuzzy. It was then that Sessions said he used to support the Klan until he learned they smoked pot.

It never pays to try to explain a joke to people who are humorless out of professional obligation, but the point of the mordant comment was that Sessions was referring to the very least of the Klan’s sins. In his Senate testimony, Sessions compared it to saying he opposed Pol Pot for wearing alligator shoes. This is how the line was understood by rational human beings who heard it at the time.

Kowalski told the committee that prosecutors working such a gruesome case sometimes “resort to operating-room humor, and that is what I considered it to be.” The only person who professed to take the line as a serious endorsement of the non-pot-smoking Klan was Sessions’s main accuser, a black prosecutor in his office, Thomas Figures, whose credibility should be in doubt based on this tendentious testimony alone. (Figures was indicted in 1992 for bribing a witness and died in 2015.)