Tom Cotton Says Ketanji Brown Jackson Might Have Defended the Nazis During the Nuremberg Trials

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) railed against Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Senate floor Tuesday and suggested she would have defended the Nazis during the Nuremberg trials.

“Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists,” Cotton stated.

“Now, it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a lawyer for being willing to take on an unpopular case,” Cotton said, before doing exactly that. “But you can certainly learn something about a lawyer from the cases they seek out.”

He noted, “Judge Jackson represented four terrorists as a public defender, one of whom she continued to represent in private practice, voluntarily. And she voluntarily filed multiple friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of terrorists while in private practice.”

Cotton went on to list some of the offenses Jackson’s clients had been accused of, seemingly in a further attempt to discredit her. The senator then expressed apparent shock that a defense attorney would argue her clients are innocent.

“Yet in every case, she claimed that none of them had anything to do with terrorism,” he said. “Not a thing, totally innocent. Just goat herders who were picked up by marauding American troops.”

The senator then referenced former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

“You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis,” he said. “This Judge Jackson might’ve gone there to defend them.”

As a Harvard-trained lawyer, Cotton surely knows it is generally poor form to use an attorney’s clients as a cudgel against her, and that this need not be grounds for disqualification from high office.

After all, Harvard alum John Adams defended the British soldiers accused of perpetrating the Boston Massacre and later became president of the United States.

Watch above via C-SPAN.