McCaskill: ‘Hypocrisy’ for GOP to target Biden nominee’s tweets after Trump

Former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) said on Tuesday that after years of condoning Trump’s behavior on Twitter, GOP officials have no leg to stand on when criticizing Joe Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) nominee Neera Tanden.

“It’s a whole new level of hypocrisy that Republican senators are now all of a sudden worried about tweets that hurt their feelings. This is just ridiculous,” said McCaskill while appearing on MSNBC. “We had a president who has used his Twitter account like a battering ram, going after not just his political opponents but Republican senators unfairly, with incredibly brutal tweets.”

Republican leaders have vowed to oppose Tanden’s nomination. She is a close ally to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and previously served as the CEO of the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. She has frequently lambasted GOP leaders on Twitter, once referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) as “Moscow Mitch.”

On Tuesday it was reported that Tanden had deleted thousands of tweets critical of Republican senators.

“It’s a disqualification for someone to serve in the Cabinet that engaged in her own opinion on Twitter? I think that’s dumb,” said McCaskill.

She added, “We got to focus on her qualifications. And yes, she is definitely more progressive, but Joe Biden won the election, and he wants to put people in there that have in fact, personally, felt the help of government programs like her family did when they were economically insecure.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters he thought Taden was Biden’s “worst nominee so far,” saying, “I think in light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path.”

McCaskill stated that Biden was looking to nominate people who would fight for “working people and the minimum wage.”

“That’s what Neera Tanden represents, so we’ll see what happens. But if they really are gonna hang their hat over a tweet, they’re gonna look silly,” said McCaskill.