Just as the polls open for early voting in Georgia’s runoff Senate election, a photo of GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler posing a with former KKK leader has emerged, and she and her campaign are firercly working to distance themselves from any association with the longtime racist.
The photo shows Loeffler posing with Chester Doles, a notorious leader in the Ku Klux Klan, and a convicted felon with ties to white supremacist groups.
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"In 1993, Doles nearly beat a Black man to death. In 2017, he marched in Charlottesville," wrote Jewish activism group Bend the Arc in a Saturday night tweet with the picture of Doles and Loeffler. "This is who Kelly Loeffler is proudly appealing to."
Doles claims that the group he belongs to now, "American Patriots USA," is not a racist organization.
Reverend Raphael Warnock is Loeffler's Democratic opponent in next month's runoff.
Loeffler’s camp says the Senator had no idea who Doles was when the photo was snapped.
"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," Stephen Lawson, Loeffler's campaign spokesman, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
The AJC reports that Doles is associated with the Hammerskins, a racist skinhead gang with whom he marched in 2017′s violent United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In an interview with The Washington Post, while Doles still incarcerated, he said he was one of five generations of family members to belong to the KKK.
“I definitely follow the Nazis. National Socialism is my religion,” Doles told The Post in 1998. “I believe in it and I look for the Fourth Reich.”
Warnock spokesperson Michael Brewer said in a statement shared with Newsweek Sunday: "While Kelly Loeffler runs a campaign based on dividing and misleading Georgians, she is once again trying to distance herself from someone who is a known white supremacist and former KKK leader who nearly beat a Black man to death. There's no acceptable explanation for it happening once, let alone a second time."