Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., refused to let up on his offensive against Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Tuesday, saying he didn’t believe her testimony to the Judiciary Committee earlier in the day and found her responses “insulting.”
“I think that her artful dodges, her hedging was insulting,” Booker told MSNBC. “And not just insulting because she wasn’t being truthful in a Senate hearing, but because she was trying to cover up for the vile and bigoted words of the president of the United States, which are not just words that go away or words that disappear.”
Booker condemned Nielsen earlier Tuesday for saying she didn’t remember President Trump using the phrase “shithole countries” during a White House meeting she attended last week with key senators regarding immigration reform.
During his maiden appearance as a member of the committee, the New Jersey Democrat told Nielsen her silence and amnesia was “complicity.”
“We have a history replete with people who are just bystanders when folks were doing things that were dangerous,” Booker continued on MSNBC Tuesday night, parroting language he used during the hearing. “And when the president of the United States has ignorance and bigotry aligned with power, it gives license, those words fester, they give people permission to do things that are despicable. So for her to be silent, it’s unacceptable.”
Trump has denied using the reference to describe foreign nations such as those on the African continent.
Lawmakers who were present at the meeting have offered conflicting accounts of the conversation.
