'I didn't accuse him!' Jeff Sessions tries to walk back calling Black Harvard professor 'some criminal'

Former Trump attorney general and current Republican Alabama Senate hopeful Jeff Sessions on Friday attempted to walk back an earlier description of a Black Harvard professor as "some criminal."

In an interview with Siraj Hashmi of the Washington Examiner, Sessions was asked about an interview that he'd conducted with the New York Times recently in which he railed against former President Barack Obama for inviting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. over to the White House to have a "beer summit" with Cambridge Police Sgt. Joe Crowley, the police officer who arrested him for supposedly trying to break into his own house.

"There was all the Obama -- there's a riot, and he has a beer at the White House with some criminal, to listen to him," said Sessions, who then falsely claimed that Obama had not also invited the officer to the White House to talk as well.

Sessions told Hashmi that he hadn't intended to cast aspersions on Gates when he called him a criminal.

"Well, I just was talking to the reporter and remembered an event in which police were unhappy, that they felt like that the person who had resisted in some way what they were trying to do at his house, they thought it was sort of a break-in," Sessions explained. "I don't know all the details, I just made a reference to the fact that [Obama] did bring in the guy who was accused of wrongdoing into the White House."

Sessions then added, "I didn't accuse him of anything."

Watch the video below.