All Hell Breaks Loose When Van Hollen Tells Sec. Rubio To His Face, He Regrets Voting To Confirm Him

All Hell Breaks Loose When Van Hollen Tells Sec. Rubio To His Face, He Regrets Voting To Confirm Him

Uh, Senator Van Halo. Uh, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, you and I served together in Congress for 15 years. We didn’t always agree, but I believe we shared some common values, a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite. And you used to speak with conviction about the importance of foreign aid as a tool to advance American values and interests. Then you stood by while Elon Musk took a chainsaw to USID and other assistance programs. That has left a staggering toll, broken trust with countries, openings for China and other adversaries, and countless preventable deaths of children and others. Take Sudan for example. The freezing of US humanitarian assistance forced the closure of nearly 80% of the emergency food kitchens there. Two million famineaffected people were left without access to food. People died because of those actions. Mothers, fathers, and children. Tons of emergency food that could have saved their lives was left rotting in warehouses because you and Elon Musk refused to let USAD do its job. Sudan is a country where by the administration’s own determination, a genocide is unfolding in Darur. But here’s where it goes from cruel to despicable. While cutting off food aid to Sudanese families living through an actual genocide, you’re fast-tracking white South Africans for refugee status under a manufactured claim that they are the victims of genocide. You tried to block the admission of individuals who had already been approved to come here as refugees while making bogus claims to justify granting such status to Africconers. You’ve made a mockery of our country’s refugee process, turning it into a system of global apartheite where political ideology and race, more than truth or need, matter. And while you’ve turned away from a genocide in Sudan and invented one in South Africa, you teamed up with President Trump to throw the Ukrainian people under the bus and had been played like a fiddle by Vladimir Putin. Of course, Donald Trump not only said he would end the war in Ukraine on day one, he also said he would end the war in Gaza on day one. And yet last week you were all running around to Gulf States giving away very sensitive American AI and ships technology but doing nothing to end the war in Gaza and get the remaining hostages returned. You know that for 78 days the Netanyahu government did not allow a scrap of food to enter Gaza to reach over 2 million civilians. 57 children have died from malnutrition so far and more than 14,000 children are in imminent danger of dying of starvation. As Cindy McCain said last week, and I quote, “Families in Gaza are starving while the food they need is sitting at the border.” That is a gross violation of both US and international law. What did you do? Nothing. Not once did you publicly call upon the Netanyahu government to end the blockade. Fortunately, other countries spoke out and now we see a tiny trickle going in. Where have you focused your energy instead, Mr. Secretary? Well, your first trip as Secretary of State was to El Salvador, not to promote democracy, but to cozy up to President Bale, who calls himself the world’s coolest dictator. The result was a cash for collusion deal to deprive people living in America of their constitutional rights to due process. The Supreme Court in a 9 to0 decision instructed you to facilitate the return to United States of Abrego Garcia who the administration admitted was wrongfully deported to El Salvador. Your response, you’ve openly flouted judicial orders. When asked whether you have been in touch with El Salvador to return Abrago Garcia, you boasted, quote, “I would never tell you that.” And you know who else I would never tell? A judge. Clearly, you don’t care about the fifth amendment right to due process. And you don’t care about the First Amendment either, since you’ve been very busy snatching students off of college campuses for exercising their right to free speech. You dredged up a relic from the McCarthy era to claim that student protesters posed a threat to the foreign policy of the United States. Give me a break, Mr. Secretary. You know as well as I do, this isn’t about national security. It’s about punishing free speech. And you know that in America, the government doesn’t get to use its power to punish speech it doesn’t like. Yet in March, you boasted about revoking student visas, saying, and I’m quoting, “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.” Unquote. Let’s look at one of those lunatics. Mr. Secretary, Miss Ostk, her crime was co-authoring an op-ed in her college paper critical of Tus University’s response to the war in Gaza. Your own department found zero links to terrorism, no anti-semitic statements. but you still ganked her visa and shipped her off to detention in Louisiana. And the list goes on and on. The federal judge in the case of Mosen Madawi, who is the Columbia student who was ambushed by federal agents at his citizen appointment, said, and I quote, “This is the judge, legal residents not charged with crimes or misconduct are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day. Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer raids. Like the McCarthy era witch hunts of the 1950s, your campaign of fear and repression is eating away at foundational values of our democracy. Back then, it took one voice, attorney Joseph Welch, to cut through the hysteria with the simple question that marked the beginning of the end of that shameful era. He asked Senator McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” And I would ask you the same, Secretary Rubio. But you have shown through your words and your actions what the answer is. And I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for Secretary of State. I yield back. May I respond? You may, sir. Well, first of all, your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job based on what I know. That’s just a flippin statement. Mr. Secretary, can I respond, Mr. Chairman? You may. I didn’t ask. Senator, please let the secretary I’d be happy to, but then I can respond to his Your time’s up, Senator. And uh woefully used, I might add. Your your remarks do not represent the view of this committee. Well, Mr. Secretary, please. Well, I’d like to I can’t respond to everything he said because much of these are untrue, but I’ll go through a few. First of all, I’m actually very proud of the work we’ve done with USAD. For example, I don’t regret cutting $10 million for male circumcisions in Mosmb beek. I don’t know how that makes us stronger and more prosperous as a nation. I don’t regret the psycho social support services. I raised. Mr. Secretary, can I respond? Uh, Senator, I’d ask you to suspend. You had seven straight minutes of I chose to use my time that way, Mr. Chairman. That’s my right to Please suspend that way. Secretary Rubio. Well, I can go on. I mean, there’s other things here. We spent $227,000 for Big Cat’s YouTube channel from USA ID. We spent $14 million for social cohesion in Mali, whatever the hell that means. So, I can go on and on. I got the list here and there’s more. I didn’t even bring the whole list. In the case of El Salvador, absolutely. Absolutely. We deported gang members. Gang members, including the one you had a margarita with. And that guy is a human trafficker and that guy is a gangbanger. And that and and the evidence is going to be clear in the days to come. You’re going to see who you went to. I’m sorry, Mr. Chairman. Secretary Rubio has the floor. Mr. Chairman, he can’t make unsubstantiated like that. Secretary Rubio has the floor. you know should take that testimony the federal United States because he hasn’t done it under oath. Here’s another point. Okay. There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge and the judicial branch cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy. No judge can tell me how I have to outreach to a foreign partner what I need to say to them. And if I do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch. Just like a judge cannot order me to negotiate with a foreign minister of Russia, they cannot order me to negotiate with a foreign minister or the president of El Salvador. And if I did negotiate with them, which we have responded to them and we’ve told them, we’ve had communications with the president of El Salvador. I am under no obligation under our division of powers in this country and to share with the led the judicial branch how I conducted diplomacy of the United States. It would actually be counterproductive if I started sharing with courts or frankly with the media my conversations with foreign leaders and all of their details. No foreign leader would talk to me again and we would break trust with them. So I I have complied with every court order. What I won’t comply with is an order to disclose what I’m saying and what we’re talking about with the foreign leader because then they won’t talk to me. Diplomacy doesn’t work that way. Um I don’t about the student visas. Let me say this. I don’t deport anybody and I don’t snatch anybody. The State Department does not have officers in the street snatching everybody. What I do is revoke visas. And it’s very simple. A visa is a is not a right. It is a privilege. People apply for student visas to come into the United States and study. And if you tell me that you’re coming to the United States to lead campus crusades, to take over libraries and burn down, try to burn down buildings and acts of violence. We’re not going to give you Is that what Miss Osor did? Is that what she did? Come on, Mr. Secretary. And every single one of these factors are different. The bottom line is if you’re coming here to stir up trouble on our campuses, we will deny you a visa. And if you have a first amendment app and we’re going to do more, there are more coming. We’re going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests and are disrupting our higher education facilities. People are paying money. These kids pay money to go to school and they have to walk to the top disrupting the foreign policy of the United States. I want to do more. I hope we can find more of these pathetic. Mr. In fact, the other day, the other day, some guys led a riot. I forgot what university it was. And I asked, “Please, can you find the arrest records of all the people that were arrested at that riot at that campus? Because if any of them have a visa, we’re going to revoke. I feel so much safer to lock up people like Miss Ast. Mr. Secretary, we’ve had enough. We’ve had enough time on the subject. Thank you very much.” And

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) spoke to Sec. Marco Rubio about the work being done at the State Department.

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