Kelly Loeffler's campaign condemned a photo which surfaced over the weekend and shows the Georgia GOP senator posing with a well-known, longtime white supremacist.
Said Stephen Lawson, Loeffler's campaign spokesman in a statement to the Atlanta Journal Constitution: “Kelly had no idea who that was, and if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for.”
Loeffler is in a competitive January runoff election with Democrat Raphael Warnock for her U.S. Senate seat which could sway the balance of power in that body.
The Hill reports: “The photo in question, which was taken at a campaign event Friday, depicts the senator smiling next to Chester Doles, a reported former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was sentenced to prison for the 1993 beating of a black man, according to The Baltimore Sun. The AJC reported that Doles also has ties to the Hammerskins, also known as Hammerskin Nation, defined as the “best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”