Fox News anchor John Roberts pressed Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Wednesday over the Republican lawmaker’s implication that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson would have defended Nazi war criminals.
The senator’s line may have been a “bridge too far,” the Fox host suggested.
During a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, the archconservative Arkansas senator once again took aim at Jackson over her work as a public defender. Specifically, he blasted her for representing four suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay—cases that were assigned to her in that role. “Federal public defenders do not get to pick their clients,” Jackson had previously noted in her confirmation hearing.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists,” the senator sneered on Tuesday. “You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might've gone there to defend them.”
Cotton’s remarks were immediately met with criticism and condemnation. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, called his comments “reprehensible” and “absolutely shameful” while demanding that he “stop trivializing the Holocaust for political gain.”
The potential GOP presidential candidate, who has appeared on Fox News hundreds of times since early 2021, was placed in the atypical position of defending himself on the network’s airwaves when Roberts repeatedly confronted him on Wednesday afternoon.
“Again, she was in the federal public defenders’ office. She did not get to pick and choose her clients,” Roberts said during Fox News’ America Reports. “This really is a matter of due process, and I’m wondering, why make that link between Judge Jackson and the Nazis and the Nuremberg trial?”
Cotton noted that while Jackson was assigned those cases while she was a public defender, she continued to represent one of those cases after she moved to private practice. Additionally, he took issue with her advocacy on behalf of her clients before the courts when she represented them.
“Frankly, I have no patience for it,” the senator groused.
“Right. So you don’t think it was a bridge too far to make the link with Nuremberg and Nazis?” Roberts shot back.
“No, John, in three separate cases she was representing not American citizens charged with a crime entitled to due process and the Constitution [but] foreign territories who had committed acts of violence against Americans,” Cotton insisted.
He added: “Again, these are not American citizens entitled to due process in a court of law, they are foreign terrorists in three cases she voluntarily advocated for in which she accused American soldiers of being war criminals. I don’t think she should be on the Supreme Court.”
Roberts and his co-anchor Sandra Smith, meanwhile, took a brief pause before thanking Cotton for joining them and ending the interview.
