Hypocritical GOP Senator Goes After Democrats: ‘I Hope Jihadists Take the Weekend Off From Trying to Kill Americans’

Cotton Filibustered an Obama Nominee Who Literally Died Waiting Over Two Years to Be Confirmed

President Donald Trump wasn’t the only Republican dishonoring the CIA this weekend. Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested that the CIA was unable to function without a director for even hours, and warned that “jihadists” might attack America because Democrats, supposedly led by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, are refusing to confirm Trump’s nominee for a variety of reasons. 

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans are in Washington this weekend at a designated special national-security event, yet the Democrats are obstructing the nomination of Mike Pompeo as CIA Director for no good reason. For Senator Wyden’s sake, I hope the jihadists take the weekend off from trying to kill Americans,” Sen. Cotton said in a statement.

This is the same GOP Senator who filibustered the nomination of President Barack Obama’s nominee to be Ambassador to the Bahamas, a public service leader who died more than two years later while waiting to be confirmed. Sen. Cotton happily admitted to her he was blocking her nomination to cause the President pain.

Pres. Obama nominated Cassandra Butts in early 2014. Sen. Cotton blocked her nomination after a hearing in May of that year. 

“When I met her last month, she’d been waiting more than 820 days to be confirmed. She died suddenly two weeks later, still waiting. She was 50 years old,” The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote in June of 2016.

“She told me that she once went to see him about it, and he explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president,” Bruni explained.

“Cotton’s spokeswoman did not dispute Butts’s characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career.”

When Butts died on May 25 — she had acute leukemia, but didn’t know it and hadn’t felt ill until just beforehand — the Bahamas had gone without an ambassador for 1,647 days.

“All Cassandra wanted to do was serve her country,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, told me. “Looking back, it is devastating to think that through no fault of her own, she spent the last 835 days of her life waiting for confirmation.”

Granted, the director of the CIA is not the Ambassador to the Bahamas, but Senator Cotton’s hyperventilating over Democrats putting the brakes on a possibly unsatisfactory nominee who should be vetted properly should be treated with respect, not threats and scare tactics.

Concerned over GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo’s positions on surveillance and torture, Human Rights Watch has urged the Senate to not confirm him as CIA director.

“Pompeo’s responses to questions about torture and mass surveillance are dangerously ambiguous about whether he would endorse abusive practices and seek to subvert existing legal protections,” said Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, US program co-director at Human Rights Watch. “Pompeo’s failure to unequivocally disavow torture and mass surveillance, coupled with his record of advocacy for surveillance of Americans and past endorsement of the shuttered CIA torture program, make clear that he should not be running the CIA.”

It’s disrespectful the the CIA, and disrespectful to the American people.

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Image by Michael Vadon via Flickr and a CC license