(AFP) – President Donald Trump lashed out Tuesday against Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, calling for him to be investigated for embellishing his military record after the lawmaker clashed with US Attorney General Pam Bondi during a congressional hearing.
“Sanctimonious Richard ‘Da Nang Dick’ Blumenthal, perhaps the biggest ‘joke’ in the United States Senate, is at it again!” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “‘Dick’ lied until the midpoint of his political career, convincing everyone, in particular the Fake News Media, that he was a great ‘War Hero’ who lived on the precipice of death in the jungles of Vietnam,” he wrote in the lengthy post. “This guy shouldn’t even be in the U.S. Senate. It should be investigated, and Justice should be sought.”
Blumenthal has served in the Senate since 2011 from the northeastern state of Connecticut—which borders Trump’s home state of New York—and received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War before enlisting in the US Marine Corps in 1970. He never served in Southeast Asia. The 79-year-old Democrat, who sits on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, got into a fiery exchange with Trump’s top prosecutor Bondi, who also accused the senator of lying about his military service.
Trump apparently compared Blumenthal to disgraced New York congressman George Santos—who was imprisoned on wire fraud and identity theft charges this year—saying the latter’s “lies were nothing compared to those of” Blumenthal’s. Blumenthal issued a statement about his military record remarks during his initial Senate campaign in 2010, saying he had “not been as clear or precise as I should have been about my service in the Marine Corps Reserves,” according to CBS News.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken a number of punitive measures against his perceived enemies and political opponents in an extraordinary, undisguised campaign of retribution against those who oppose him, in defiance of decades of norms in US politics. In 2017, during Trump’s first term in office, Blumenthal sued the president on suspicion of violating the emoluments clause of the US Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting gifts. The case was eventually dismissed.
© 2024 AFP
