Rumor has it that Rex Tillerson will soon be out as Secretary of State, to be replaced by current CIA Director Mike Pompeo. The rumor holds that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is slated to take Pompeo’s place as CIA Director. I am not sure why anyone would want to leave the Senate for the CIA; maybe Cotton is tired of having to defer to John McCain, Susan Collins et al. to get anything done.
In any event, liberals have picked up on the report and have begun smearing Cotton on Twitter. We noticed today that a post that Scott did in 2015 was getting quite a bit of traffic, something that doesn’t often happen. The post was titled Nine Years Later, Tom Cotton’s Letter to the Times. It recounted the story of Cotton as an infantry officer in Baghdad who wrote a letter to the New York Times, criticizing that paper’s illegal disclosure of classified information that, Cotton wrote, had put his troops in danger.
Tom’s letter concluded:
[H]aving graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.
It was a great letter, and we publicized it here at Power Line. But now it is being used for a different purpose by Democrats–to criticize Cotton’s fitness as Director of Central Intelligence.
Democrat Blake Hounshell, the Editor in Chief of Politico, is on an anti-Cotton tear.
That time Tom Cotton wrote a letter to the New York Times calling for James Risen and Eric Lichtblau to be put in jail https://t.co/qWLCBiY4zc
— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) November 30, 2017
No mention of James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s criminal violations as described by Cotton. To hear Hounshell tell it, you would think Cotton wanted to round the reporters up for no particular reason.
Jessica Huseman is a “reporter” for Pro Publica. She offered this similar tweet:
Oh, and that time he advocated that NYT journalists be jailed. https://t.co/rocNZLrmMt pic.twitter.com/MjpYEasBos
— Jessica Huseman (@JessicaHuseman) November 30, 2017
This is quite bizarre. Most people expect, and want, the CIA director to protect national security secrets. That is a big part of his job. One would also expect that he would want the Espionage Act enforced, so as to protect our troops and our agents in the field. Yet liberals apparently think that Senator Tom Cotton is disqualified from the office because he called for enforcement of federal laws when their violation by reporters at the New York Times endangered his troops in Iraq.
This is one more sign that craziness on the Left has burst all bounds.
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