House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said Tuesday morning that it was a “mistake” that the administration didn’t go through with bombing drug labs in Mexico after then-President Donald Trump suggested it in 2020.
“One of the things we learned post-Trump presidency is that he had ordered a bombing of a couple of fentanyl labs, crystal meth labs, in Mexico, just across the border and for whatever reason the military didn’t do it,” he said on Fox News. “I think that was a mistake.”
That Trump suggested bombing the United States’ southern neighbor and ally was revealed in former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s book, “A Sacred Oath,” last year. Esper relayed that Trump thought such an act of war could be performed discreetly.
“When Mr. Esper raised various objections, Mr. Trump said that ‘we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,’ adding that ‘no one would know it was us,’” the New York Times wrote from an advanced copy of Esper’s book. “Mr. Trump said he would just say that the United States had not conducted the strike, Mr. Esper recounts, writing that he would have thought it was a joke had he not been staring Mr. Trump in the face.”
During his Tuesday interview, Comer also said that “certainly we need to have a strong military presence on that southern border,” a seeming clarification of his position a couple months ago when he floated cutting off “all funding for everything” before deciding how best to secure the border.
Comer also bemoaned that the Biden administration is paying more attention to the “Ukrainian border” than the Mexican border.
Comer’s committee is holding a hearing on the border on Wednesday called “Force Multipliers: Examining the Need for Additional Resources to Disrupt Transnational Crime at the Border and Beyond.”
Also on the docket for the Oversight committee are upcoming hearings about “the Biden family investigation” and “Twitter’s role in suppressing the Biden laptop story.”
Comer made headlines last week during a different Fox News hit, when he lamented that Beau Biden, President Joe Biden’s son who died of cancer in 2015, was never prosecuted. Comer has repeatedly insisted that the House investigations, so far nearly exclusively centered on Joe Biden’s younger son, Hunter, are actually about the President himself.
