Conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s questioning of secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson was needlessly confrontational and, in the end, made no difference.
During a congressional hearing on Wednesday to consider Tillerson’s nomination, Rubio aggressively questioned Tillerson on whether he would designate Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “war criminal” and probed him for his views on Russia’s involvement in Syria.
“In intense questioning, Sen. Marco Rubio was strangely, yippily hostile,” wrote Noonan. “‘Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?’ Mr. Rubio pressed. ‘I would not use that term,’ Mr. Tillerson replied, blandly, but with an expression that allowed you to imagine a thought bubble: You can mess with me, son, but it won’t end well for you. In the end, Mr. Rubio did Mr. Tillerson no harm and himself no good.”
After Tillerson declined to dub Putin a war criminal, Rubio disapprovingly said, “It should not be hard to say that Vladimir Putin’s military has conducted war crimes in Aleppo [Syria] because it is never acceptable, you would agree, for a military to specifically target civilians — which is what’s happened there, through the Russian military. I find it discouraging, your inability to cite that, which I think is globally accepted.”
Tillerson only allowed that he would want more information from intelligence agencies before making that judgment on Putin.
President-elect Trump’s choice to head the State Department was widely perceived to have delivered a mixed performance during the hearing. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., often a critic of Trump, said, however, that Tillerson’s nomination is still “salvageable.”
