On Thursday morning, Donald Trump accused Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal of misrepresenting comments made to him by Judge Neil Gorsuch regarding Trump’s criticism of Judge James Robart, who issued a stay of Trump’s Muslim ban on Friday. In his tweets, Trump referenced Blumenthal’s lies about his service in the Vietnam War, which emerged during his 2010 Senate run. Trump’s Vietnam deferments and his mischaracterizations of them were topics of interest during the 2016 campaign.
CNN was quick to point out that Chris Cuomo’s very first question to Blumenthal did, in fact, address the senator’s dishonesty about his Vietnam record.
On Wednesday, Blumenthal said Gorsuch called Trump’s comments about Robart “demoralizing and disheartening.” As Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote, Blumenthal’s account was confirmed by his spokesman.
Sen. Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Thursday morning that Gorsuch had similarly “welled up” with energy and told him that any attack on “brothers or sisters of the robe” constituted an attack on the whole judiciary.
Former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who is assisting the Trump administration with Gorsuch’s confirmation process, said in a statement Thursday that while Gorsuch was not referring specifically to Trump’s criticism of Robart when he made his comment, he “finds any criticism of a judge’s integrity and independence disheartening and demoralizing.”
The Democratic National Committee has called the entire episode a “ruse” designed to make Gorsuch seem unwedded to Trump in order to aid his confirmation. “As Senator Blumenthal made clear,” DNC adviser Zac Petkanas said in a statement, “Gorsuch’s suspicious private criticism is not nearly enough to prove he’ll fulfill his duty as a check on the concerning and unconstitutional behavior of the president.”
Judge Dan Polster of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio also criticized Trump’s comments about Robart at an event in Cleveland on Wednesday night. From Cleveland.com:
U.S. District Judge Dan Polster made the comments during a speech Wednesday night to the civil rights committee of Cleveland’s Anti-Defamation League without mentioning Trump’s name. He noted that comments like the ones that the new president made this week could be dangerous.
“This is serious business, because you start calling into question the legitimacy of someone, that undermines the whole system, all right?”
