 |
| Bill Pryor and Jeff Sessions in a 1996 photograph |
It also might explain why, when Donald Trump last night announced Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, Pryor's name was nowhere to be found. When Trump had to fill the late Antonin Scalia's seat, Pryor initially was seen as the favorite. But as word spread that he had posed nude for photographs that wound up at the gay-porn site badpuppy.com in the late 1990s, Pryor's star seemed to fade -- and he finished a distant third, with Neil Gorsuch, of Colorado, getting the nod.
When the Kennedy seat recently became open, Pryor's name again surfaced as a candidate, in some quarters. But he quickly fell off the leader board, and reportedly was not among the seven candidates that Trump interviewed.
Is that, in part, because of our reporting -- which has spread to sites across the nation -- about Pryor's ties to gay porn via badpuppy.com? That seems likely. But it's also possible that political insiders, including some on Team Trump, are learning that the Pryor/Sessions relationship is disturbing -- even perverse. And we now are learning that the perversity goes back much farther than originally thought.
Nothing in Pryor's background suggests he is, or ever will be, an outstanding judge or legal thinker. But as journalist Wayne Madsen points out, Pryor has enjoyed the consistent support of Sessions, and that has little, if anything, to do with Pryor's legal qualifications. It appears to have almost everything to do with Sessions and Pryor being closeted gays -- with Sessions willing to take advantage of a young man when he was barely out of high school.
It all raises this ugly question: Did Jeff Sessions commit acts with Bill Pryor that come close to defining him as a child sexual abuser?
Pryor grew up in Mobile, while Sessions has spent much of his professional life in that coastal Alabama city. We have reported on nude photographs of Pryor that wound up on the gay-porn Web site badpuppy.com in 1997. We have reported that Alabama law enforcement -- because of concerns that Pryor's hidden lifestyle could make him vulnerable to blackmail as the state's attorney general (or as a federal judge, a position for which Pryor already was angling) -- conducted surveillance that showed Sessions making frequent late-night visits to Pryor's apartment in Montgomery. We also reported that the Obama administration threatened to use information about Sessions' secret life to make sure he did not block the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.
But Madsen's latest report adds important new insight to the peculiar Sessions-Pryor relationship, which is particularly timely as Sessions remains near the center of the Robert Mueller investigation, and evidence grows that Pryor lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing to the federal bench. Our reporting tied the Session-Pryor sexual relationship to the late 1990s, but Madsen reports that it started much earlier than that -- when Pryor was a student at Northeast Louisiana University (now University of Louisiana Monroe), from 1980-84.
All of this is ironic, of course, because Sessions and Pryor have taken ardently anti-gay, conservative positions in their right-wing political lives. From a 2017 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, by reporter Bill Rankin:
Pryor, 54, has called Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case legalizing abortion, the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law.” And he once wrote that the right to engage in same-sex relationships would “logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia.”
As for Madsen, this is from his article, published June 28-29, at Wayne Madsen Report (a subscription-only Web site), which focuses primarily on the Anthony Kennedy retirement and his possible successor:
Another potential Kennedy replacement is William Pryor, Jr., now serving on the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Pryor is subject to blackmail, something that Trump would find to his own advantage. Pryor is a close personal friend and longtime apprentice of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Several Alabama sources claim that in 1980, Sessions, who was 34 at the time, began a gay relationship with Pryor, then an 18-year old student at Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe. Pryor also allegedly posed nude for a gay magazine during his college years. In 1997, as Alabama Governor Fob James was announcing Pryor's appointment as Attorney General of Alabama, replacing Sessions who was elected to the U.S. Senate, the photos appeared in a gallery of college-aged boys, titled "WizardBoy Pix," on a gay website called badpuppy.com.
Sessions was pushing for Pryor to be nominated to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia. Scalia died while participating in a Valentine's Weekend hunting and orgy fest at the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Texas. Trump, instead, opted for Gorsuch.
Pryor has denied the photos on the gay website are of him, however, they were salacious enough to have caused the Alabama Bureau of Investigation to report their existence to Governor James after he appointed Pryor to fill the Attorney General vacancy left by Sessions. There were enough doubts about Pryor's past to cause 45 senators to vote against his 2005 nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
We sought comment from Pryor and Sessions' spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores. They did not respond to our queries.
Meanwhile, we have tracked down multiple individuals who knew Pryor at Northeast Louisiana, mainly from participation in the band and work-study jobs. They say the badpuppy.com photos definitely are of the Bill Pryor -- and one describes Pryor as "flamboyant" in his homosexuality while in college. Several posts on this topic are coming soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment