Tuesday on Hugh Hewitt’s nationally syndicated radio show, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY) assertion that it is “standard method” for staff lawyers to question Attorney General William Barr on FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Cotton advised that in his six years in the House and Senate it has not been the standard to question members of the cabinet with staff lawyers.
“[N]ot standard at all, especially to do both of them together – let members take their five minutes to grandstand for the TV cameras and be ineffective in asking questions, or more likely giving a speech for five minutes, and then to come back and have counsel ask questions. That is not standard at all,” Cotton said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “And I would tell the attorney general that he should stand his ground on this one. If they want him to come up and they want to question him as members who are elected to do this job, that’s what they should do. That’s what we did during the Obama administration.”
He added that if the Democrats do not have attorneys talented enough to go “toe to toe” with Barr, then that is their own problem.
“I’ll just say this to Chairman Nadler and the Democrats. If they are incapable of going toe to toe with Bill Barr, if they have put people on the Judiciary Committee who are not skilled questioners and talented attorneys, that’s a you problem,” he said.
“Why should Bill Barr accommodate their failures and the fact that they don’t have talented lawyers on the committee who can go toe to toe with a talented lawyer like Bill Barr? Why should he bend over backwards to accommodate them? They should be able to do the basic job that their voters elected them to do, which is to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” Cotton continued.
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