WASHINGTON – The chairman opened the hearing with a provocative dare: Say it to my face.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, has made clear he has little regard for President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, fellow Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin. He says he'll vote against him.
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Their differences go way back.
Mullin has called him a “freaking snake,” siding with Paul’s neighbor who left the senator with multiple broken ribs after a surprise attack, the neighbor having pummeled the senator as he was doing yardwork outside his home.
Paul calls Mullin a liar with anger management problems who lacks the temperament to lead the troubled Homeland Security Department that is at the forefront of Trump's mass deportation agenda.
"Tell it to the world why you believe I deserved to be assaulted,” Paul said on Wednesday as he gaveled the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to order.
“Explain to the American people why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and border patrol agents."
Mullin, a mixed martial arts champion who has led workout sessions in the House gym — including with then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who was sitting behind him in the front row of supporters — took a page from the Trump administration playbook.
Fight, fight, fight. He was not backing down.
“If I have something to say, I’ll say it directly to your face,” Mullin retorted.
Combative fits with the Cabinet
Mullin put on display why he is being tapped for the job, a presidential favorite to take over the agency as embattled Secretary Kristi Noem heads for the exit.
He reiterated what he had said about Paul, that he "can understand why your neighbor did what he did.”
“I am not apologizing,” Mullin deadpanned at one point.
In what has been a tumultuous season of fiery committee hearings, the exchange was like few others.
Trump administration officials — and those who aspire to join the Cabinet — have been squaring off with members of Congress, primarily Democrats, who are pushing back against the president's people and policies. But the broadsides from Paul, a fellow Republican who has also tangled with Trump as an outlier in the GOP, presented a rare bipartisan rebuttal. It showed Mullin's narrow path to Senate confirmation, with a vote expected next week.
And it didn’t stop there.
Mullin was grilled for three hours about his personal character and public expertise for the Homeland job. He is not a policy wonk, steeped in the intricacies of immigration enforcement, FEMA or other Homeland Security operations. Nor is he a known management expert, having taken over the family plumbing business before joining Congress.
What Mullin brings to the job is a relationship with Trump — he called the president a “friend” — and a reputation as an affable convener of people across the political divide, steadily bouncing his stress ball as he walks through the halls of Congress.
Senators push Mullin on a secret trip
GOP colleagues praised Mullin's character, and he teared up when telling the story about the way Trump doted over his son, Jimmy, who was undergoing health problems while the president was busy campaigning in 2020.
But Mullin left senators perplexed about the secret trip he said he made some years ago to a foreign country, which he described as having warzone-like conditions.
Senators said the FBI, which conducts background checks on executive branch nominees, had no record of any such trip, and the committee leaders insisted Mullin meet them in a secure facility afterward to discuss what they called his “super secret” mission to a foreign country.
“I didn’t say it was ‘super secret’,” Mullin snapped.
Yet it was the opening exchange that set the tenor of the debate – and signaled the narrow support Mullin is expected to have in a committee vote Thursday.
Paul opened with a plea for an end to the political violence that has rippled through the country, from the start of his own political career in 2011, when former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot at a Congress-on-the-corner event outside a Tucson grocery store, to the 2017 congressional baseball game practice when he was warming up in the batting cage as a gunman opened fire, and on and on.
“It is imperative now more than ever that the leaders of our country disavow violence and lead by example,” Paul said.
He played a video reel of Mullin almost brawling with a union leader — telling him to “stand your butt up” — at another Senate hearing in 2023.
Mullin acknowledged that he and Paul simply have their differences.
“We just don’t get along," he testified.
Mullin said he and the union leader, Sean O'Brien of the Teamsters who was sitting behind him in the audience, had become friends.
“I can set it aside if you're willing to set it aside,” Mullin told Paul.
Paul circled back, “Somehow you think I’m going to just set that aside?"