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Georgia Senator Loeffler Says She Had ‘No Idea’ She Took Picture With KKK Leader

Smiling and sporting a dark green cap with an American flag, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) posed side by side with a former Ku Klux Klan leader at a Friday campaign event in Dawsonville, Ga.

But after the viral photo with Chester Doles drew intense criticism amid a crucial Senate runoff campaign, the senator is distancing herself from any association with the longtime white supremacist. A campaign spokesman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday that Loeffler was unaware she was posing with a man who spent decades in the KKK and the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Right, everyone in Georgia knows who Doles is.

Doles’s long history of white supremacism has been well documented. In 1993, Doles was sentenced to prison for beating a Black man at a stoplight in Maryland, and he was sentenced again on separate weapons violations in Georgia.

In a 1998 jailhouse interview with The Post, Doles, with tattoos on his hands of a swastika and the words, “WHITE POWER,” 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.”

Doles had also followed the National Alliance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed for decades to be the “most dangerous and best organized Neo-Nazi” group in the United States, and he has been tied to the Hammerskins, a white supremacist group founded in the 1980s in Dallas. He marched with the group in the 2017 Unite the Right rally, the deadly white-supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville.

The picture with Loeffler was posted Friday to Doles’s account on VK, a Russian social media platform, with a caption reading, “Kelly [Loeffler] and I. Save America, stop Socialism!″

“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 Journal-Constitution in a statement Sunday.