Jeff Sessions on Hawaii gaffe: 'Nobody has a sense of humour any more'

Martin Pengelly
Sunday 23 April 2017 20.05 BST

Jeff Sessions on Sunday declined to apologize for his controversial remarks about Hawaii this week, which the attorney general dismissed as “an island in the Pacific” while criticising a judge’s decision to block Donald Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority nations.

“Nobody has a sense of humour any more,” Jeff Sessions said in an interview with ABC’s This Week, two days after he told CNN: “I wasn’t criticising the judge or the island.”

Speaking to CNN, Sessions added: “I think it’s a fabulous place and had a granddaughter born there. But I got to tell you, it’s a point worth making that a single sitting judge out of 600, 700 district judges can issue an order stopping a presidential executive order that I believe is fully constitutional, designed to protect the United States of America from terrorist attacks.”

Trump’s travel ban order was his second attempt to impose drastic limits on travellers and refugees from six Muslim-majority countries. In March Derrick Kahala Watson, the only Hawaiian-born federal judge now serving on a bench, issued a nationwide stay against it.

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