New York, March 9 Tweets by Vanita Gupta, the nominee for Associate Attorney-General, came up on Tuesday when she appeared before Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing, where she also received praise for her civil rights advocacy.
Gupta expressed regret for the tweets and said that she had "fallen prey" to "the rhetoric has gotten quite harsh over the last several years".
"I wish I could take it back, I can't," she added.
The nomination of an Indian American, Neera Tanden, to be a member of President Joe Biden's Cabinet was torpedoed by her vitriolic tweets and statements.
Gupta, who unlike Tanden has broader support in both parties, faced similar questions about her past social media presence and statements in her quest for the third-highest position in the Justice Department where she will be in charge of civil and human rights issues.
She asked the senators to instead "look at my lifelong record" as a believer "in the importance of building consensus" and as "a deeply pragmatic person and relationship builder".
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, while praising some of her civil rights work, brought up her tweets, one of which called the Republican Party National Convention in which some senators on the Judiciary Committee participated as "three nights of racism".
He said that she would have to be involved in cases before several judges who she had attacked online.
Committee Chair Dick Durbin, a Democrat, recalled her work in Texas as a young lawyer and praised her record as a civil rights lawyer.
Introducing her, he said that she had successfully worked to overturn the wrongful conviction of 38 people, most of them African Americans, in Tulia and it had been endorsed by Rick Perry, the Republican Governor of Texas at that time, and the victims received $6 million in settlement.
He compared her work to that of Thurdgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Judge, who had also worked like her with the NAACP
( With inputs from IANS )
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