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Republicans in the US Senate are attempting to exploit the New Year’s Day attack that killed 14 victims in New Orleans, while injuring dozens more, to push through Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet nominations and rocket-charge the incoming president’s anti-immigration agenda – despite the fact that the attacker was a US citizen born and raised in east Texas.
Several Senate Republicans appeared on Sunday’s political shows to call for an urgent approval of the most contentious of Trump’s cabinet selections who are facing a tough confirmation process. They include Kash Patel, chosen by Trump for FBI director; Pete Hegseth for defense secretary; and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.
The senators seized on Wednesday’s devastating attack in New Orleans, in which a pickup truck bearing an Islamic State flag was driven at high speed in the city’s French Quarter, killing more than a dozen revellers before police shot the attacker dead in a gunfight. They said that any delay in confirmation of the controversial cabinet picks would damage US national security.
Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is a leading Trump loyalist, said he would vote for all the president-elect’s nominees. “Do them now, do them quick, get them all done,” he told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures. “We are under attack here – we are at war.”
Graham added that what he called the “broken border” was a “national security nightmare”.
“Every day we don’t shut down that border is another day for terrorists to come in,” Graham said.
The unfounded link between the New Orleans attack and border security was made in the immediate aftermath by Trump and top congressional Republicans. The day after the attack, Mike Johnson, the Louisiana representative who has just been re-elected as House speaker, said that he had been “ringing the alarms” over what he called the “obvious concern about terrorism and the wide open border, the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves and setting up potentially terrorist cells”.
The sole attacker in the New Orleans killings, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was born in Beaumont, Texas, and at the time of the outrage was living in Houston. He served in the US army for 13 years.
He merely needed to drive about six hours east – crossing only Texas’s border with Louisiana – to position himself for the attack he launched.
The US homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told ABC News’s This Week that the nation was grappling with a “very difficult threat landscape”. But he said the “assailant who perpetrated the terrorist attack in New Orleans was born in the United States, raised in the United States, and served in our armed forces”.
“It is not an issue of the border,” he said.
Much of the renewed Republican push to overcome opposition to Trump’s picks is focused on Patel, his choice for FBI director. Patel has no experience working at the bureau and has come under fire for threatening to close down the FBI headquarters in the Hoover Building and turn it into a “deep state” museum – in effect, tearing apart the very institution that if confirmed he would lead and for days has been at the center of efforts to prevent another New Orleans-style attack.
Jim Banks, who is serving in his first week as a US senator from Indiana, told CNN’s State of the Union that – in his view – “Kash is right”.
“The last four years we’ve seen the leadership of the FBI be more focused on the political causes of the left, going after parents at school board meetings instead of going after (IS) members,” he said.
One of the first Republican leaders to call for rapid confirmations was John Thune, the Senate’s new majority leader. Within hours of the New Orleans attack, he described it as a “clear example of why the Senate must get President Trump’s national security team in place as quickly as possible”.
On Sunday he took a more cautious line, declining to tell NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he would vote for Patel. “My job is to make sure [nominees] get a fair process, and so I intend to do that,” he said.
Thune was asked what he thought about Patel’s target list of 60 political enemies – or “government gangsters”, as he calls them – that he has promised to go after should he be approved for FBI director. “Are you certain that Kash Patel’s priorities would be fighting crime, protecting national security rather than settling political scores?” Thune was asked.
Thune said that the FBI was “in need of reform” and a “good makeover” to rebuild public confidence in the institution. “I think [Patel] understands that’s the mission,” Thune remarked.
Other key members of Trump’s desired national security team are also facing hurdles in their bid to be confirmed through the senate. Hegseth is struggling against sexual misconduct allegations against him made in 2017, which he denies. Gabbard has come under a barrage of criticism for her alleged sympathy towards Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Already one of Trump’s selections, Matt Gaetz, who was nominated as attorney general, has been forced to back out after he came under scrutiny for allegedly having sexual relations with a girl aged 17 in her junior year of high school at the team.
Trump has made it clear that he sees a quick formation of a cabinet consisting of individuals who owe him unquestionable fealty as a top priority for the start of his new presidency.
