WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has demanded an investigation into Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal over allegations about his military record embellishment.
Trump launched the attack after Blumenthal clashed with US Attorney General Pam Bondi during a congressional hearing.
“Sanctimonious Richard ‘Da Nang Dick’ Blumenthal, perhaps the biggest ‘joke’ in the United States Senate, is at it again!” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social.
“’Dick’ lied until the midpoint of his political career, convincing everyone, in particular the Fake News Media, that he was a great ‘War Hero’ who lived on the precipice of death in the jungles of Vietnam,“ he continued in the lengthy post.
Trump declared that Blumenthal should not even be in the Senate and called for justice to be sought through an investigation.
Blumenthal has represented Connecticut in the Senate since 2011 after receiving five draft deferments during the Vietnam War before enlisting in the US Marine Corps in 1970.
The senator never actually served in Southeast Asia despite previous suggestions about his military background.
The 79-year-old Democrat serves on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee where he engaged in a fiery exchange with Bondi, who also accused him of lying about his military service.
Trump compared Blumenthal to disgraced New York congressman George Santos, who was imprisoned this year on wire fraud and identity theft charges.
The president claimed Santos’s “lies were nothing compared to those of” Blumenthal’s.
Blumenthal previously addressed his military record remarks during his 2010 Senate campaign, acknowledging he had “not been as clear or precise as I should have been about my service in the Marine Corps Reserves.”
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken numerous punitive measures against his perceived enemies and political opponents.
This represents an extraordinary, undisguised campaign of retribution against those who oppose him, defying decades of political norms.
In 2017 during Trump’s first term, Blumenthal sued the president for suspected violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause prohibiting government officials from accepting gifts.
That legal case was eventually dismissed by the courts. – AFP
