Marshall Billingslea’s bid to become the Trump Administration’s top nuclear arms negotiator may not have been knocked off easy street yet, but it certainly encountered some potholes in his confirmation hearing this week, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat said the nominee is stained by his support of torture and generally unfit for the job.
“We should not be moving forward with Mr. Billingslea’s nomination, period,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said in his opening statement at Tuesday’s hearing. “The stain of torture, combined with his credibility gap, should be disqualifying.”
President Donald Trump in May nominated Billingslea as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. He would succeed Andrea Thompson, who stepped down last October.
The showing on Capitol Hill follows Billingslea’s public reintroduction to Washington’s fourth-estate defense wonks at a friendly forum in May. There, the practiced Republican policy hand — a hard-liner on Middle Eastern terrorism and a veteran of the Geroge W. Bush administration’s Defense Department — argued that any change to the ongoing U.S. nuclear arsenal modernization program hurts his chances of negotiating a new arms control agreement with Russia and China.
Billingslea currently serves as special presidential envoy for arms control.
The Trump administration is pressing for a trilateral arms control treaty with Russia and China to replace the New START deal between Washington Moscow, but no negotiations are underway. China has said it will not join such an accord. In June, Beijing declined to join U.S. and Russian officials for arms-control talks in Vienna, Austria.
New START will expire in February, if the U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin do not agree to an extension. The treaty limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads on a total of no more than 700 fielded intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and heavy bombers.
During the Bush administration, when he was principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Billingslea was “a strong advocate for hooding, 24-hour interrogations, forced grooming, sleep deprivation, removal of clothing, face- and stomach-slaps, and use of dogs in interrogations,” Menendez said.
lBillingslea, revisiting the turn-of-the-millennium debate about whether such so-called advanced interrogation techniques are merely torture by another name, told Menendez that he never supported anything “characterized” to him at the time as torture. Menendez called that answer “disingenuous at best.”
A Senate report from 2008 showed Billingslea advocated for techniques later deemed torture on terrorism detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Among those detained there is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Pressed by Menendez to explain, under oath, whether he ever advocated for certain interrogation techniques later deemed to be torture, Billingslea said he was only doing his job.
“There was a working group that comprised lawyers from across the spectrum, there was a separate group comprised of professional interrogators — I’m neither a lawyer, nor a professional interrogator — and I had to reply on the best advice given on both sides of that equation, in an effort to create a process,” Billingslea said. “Deputy assistant secretaries of defense at the Pentagon are not empowered to make unilateral decisions as you suggest.”
Despite Menendez’s objections, majority Republicans on the committee have the power to advance him to the Senate floor without help from Democrats.
If committee Republicans have to jam Billingslea through on a straight party-line vote this time, it might complete a brewing sea change among the upper chamber’s minority.
The last times the White House nominated Billingslea for a State Department job, in 2018 and 2019, his nomination didn’t get a floor vote. Both times, Billingslea was up for the role of undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights.
The last time the Senate confirmed Billingslea was in June 2017, when he got through fairly comfortably on a 65-35 margin to become the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing. At the time, 12 Democrats crossed the aisle to join every Senate Republican in voting “aye.”
The Foreign Relations Committee had not scheduled a business meeting to vote on Billingslea’s nomination, at deadline Friday.
