U.S. Sen. Bob Corker must have bananas on his mind a lot, as he continues to use them as an analogy while criticizing the president who handily carried his state in the 2016 elections.
While speaking to reporters on Thursday, Corker (R-TN) criticized President Donald Trump’s removal of former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance as “kind of a banana republic kind of thing,” Breitbart reported. And part of a “tearing down of institutions” instead of building them up.
Trump won 60.7 percent of the presidential vote in Tennessee against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Ballotpedia says.
Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said, “Look, I thought it was kind of a banana republic kind of thing. There’s been a continual sort of tearing down of institutions, causing Americans to lose faith in institutions, instead of building them up. I mean, that’s what’s made our country function in the way that it is.”
“Yet again Senator Corker has shown he is willing to embrace any individual or wacky position that is critical of President Trump regardless of its legitimacy. He’s done everything except put on a black facemask and march with Antifa – but there is always next week,” Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill said, adding:
Corker should be worried about the rot, corruption and illegal actions within the FBI, DOJ and other national security organizations that are actually destroying those once great and reliable institutions rather than attacking those who are revealing the problems in the “deep state” and trying to repair the damage they have done.
Corker clearly wants to keep his security clearance and make sure his DC cronies keep theirs so thhe can monetize it as others have done. It is past time to rein in this corrupt practice across the board and to insure that only those few people who are providing needed and valuable insights that benefit America rather than themselves retain any security clearance after they leave government service.
Just last month, Tennessee’s junior senator went bananas and likened the Trump Administration to a “banana republic” for wanting to yank security clearances of ex-government hacks who are using their positions to attack the president, The Tennessee Star reported.
The administration’s proposal is “the kind of thing that happens in Venezuela,” Tennessee’s junior senator told MSNBC, as reported by Politico. “I can’t even believe that somebody at the White House thought up something like this. I mean, when you’re going to start taking retribution against people who are your political enemies in this manner, that’s the kind of thing that happens in Venezuela.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s administration is considered a dictatorship.
Bananas and dictators are on Corker’s mind a lot lately.
Corker met with the Venezuelan dictator in May to secure the release of an American prisoner, surprising the Trump Administration and members of Congress. The meeting came one week after Maduro won re-election in a sham election.
“Not all members of Congress welcomed Corker’s visit to the South American country, especially in the wake of a presidential race the United States, several Latin American countries and some European nations have deemed illegitimate,” Newsweek reported U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) as saying.
Corker’s trash talking of the president last month came a day after the White House announced it was looking to remove security clearances held by Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former NSA Director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser Susan Rice and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
A spokeswoman for McCabe said his security clearance was “deactivated” after he was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in March, The Washington Examiner said. Comey, too, reportedly has not had a security clearance for roughly a year. The former FBI director was fired from his post in May 2017.
