Tom Cotton Is Not Mailing It In

[Valin]

NY Times Magazine:

MARK LEIBOVICH

April 3 2015

 

Your last name is Cotton, and this interview was arranged by your communications director, Caroline Rabbitt. Who is your chief of staff, Beatrix Potter?

 

If only. No, my chief of staff is Doug Coutts.

 

You were raised in rural Arkansas, attended Harvard and Harvard Law and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. What was a bigger culture shock for you?

 

The Middle East and South Asia have a lot less in common with America than 18-year-old kids in Boston have with 18-year-old kids in Arkansas. Teenagers are kinda the same wherever you find them in America.

 

Your parents were Democrats, and you were 15 when your state’s native son, Bill Clinton, was elected president. When did you become a Republican?

 

That was the beginning of my attentiveness to politics. When he was running, my thinking was, I can’t believe my governor is running for president. By the end of Clinton’s first year in office, I was like, Wow, I must not be a Democrat.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

When Tom Cotton mailed it in to the Times

Scott Johnson

April 5, 2015

 

We have written a lot over the years about the repeated violations of the Espionage Act by New York Times reporters including James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. I wrote a January 2006 column for the Weekly Standard that the Standard titled “Exposusre.” (I reposted it on Power Line last year under the heading “Is the Times a law unto itself?” in the context of Risen’s refusal to testify in the Espionage Act case brought against former CIA office Jeffrey Sterling.)

 

Risen and Lichtblau blew the highly classified SWIFT terrorist finance tracking in their June 2006 Times story “Bank data is sifted by U.S. in secret to block terror.” In addition to its illegality under the Espionage Act, in my opinion, the story was an act of wanton destruction with no arguable public purpose.

 

Senator Tom Cotton was then a lieutenant serving in Baghdad. He copied us on a letter to the editor of the New York Times about Risen and Lichtblau’s June 2006 story blowing the SWFT program. The Times didn’t publish it, but we did.

 

(Snip)

 

In his 2012 four-part NR profile “Tom Cotton of Arkansas,” Jay Nordlinger told the rest of the story in part II (part III is here, part IV is here):

 

(Snip)

 

 

When Cotton finally saw the battalion commander, the commander said, “Did you see the chief’s e-mail?” “Yes, sir.” “You know I was supposed to chew you out, right?” “Yes, I heard about that, sir.” “Do you know I’m now supposed to punch you on the shoulder and say ‘Attaboy’?” “I was hoping that would be the case, sir.” “Well, here’s a piece of advice: You’re new here. No one’s trying to infringe on your right to send a letter or whatnot. But next time, give your chain of command a heads-up.”

 

(This conversation, and the one before it with the company commander, has been heavily Bowdlerized for family-friendly reading.)

 

 

(Snip)