The Senate confirmed Colin Kahl as the Pentagon’s policy chief on Tuesday on a party-line vote, after a long and contentious dispute over his history of support for the Iran nuclear deal and his pointed public comments about the GOP.
A showdown on the floor was narrowly avoided only after two Republican senators were called out of town on family emergencies, giving Democrats an easy 49 to 45 vote to confirm Kahl in the evenly split chamber. Last week, Vice President Harris had to cast a tiebreaking vote to free Kahl’s nomination from the Senate Armed Services Committee, after weeks of politically charged deadlock surrounding his nomination.
Kahl, who served as a national security adviser to President Biden when Biden was vice president, has faced pointed blowback about his online persona since being selected to assume one of the most influential leadership positions at the Defense Department. Republicans objected to past tweets in which he wrote that the GOP exhibited a “death-cult fealty to Trump” and that Republicans had chosen to “debase themselves at the alter of Trump” as “the party of ethnic cleansing.”
In his confirmation hearing last month, Kahl apologized for his language, saying he had been “disrespectful” but would be more diplomatic and bipartisan if confirmed to the job.
Republicans did not accept the apology.
“I don’t believe he has the temperament or judgment to do the job,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday, adding that Kahl was “more of a political hack ... or someone with the temperament of an Internet troll” than a statesman.
Democrats, meanwhile, have supported his nomination, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended Kahl last month as a “qualified” and “experienced” nominee who would “bring an incredible reservoir of perspective to the job.”
Some Republicans have recently suggested that Kahl also “publicly disclosed classified information” in his tweets; they wrote to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray this month asking him to look into the matter. Kahl has denied those allegations.
On Tuesday, many Republicans, including the top GOP senator on the Armed Services panel, James M. Inhofe (Okla.), also accused Kahl of being a “conspiracy theorist” because of past comments critical of Israel’s approach to Iran.
Kahl’s confirmation has become a preview of the partisan fights to come as the Biden administration tries to rejoin an international pact to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, an initiative that is bitterly opposed by most Republicans.
Kahl played a role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and has advocated that “a willingness to reenter the nuclear deal” should be “a starting point for new negotiations” with Tehran. That stance, however, is anathema to many congressional Republicans, who cheered when Donald Trump as president withdrew the United States from the accord in 2018.
This month, as the Biden administration joined new Iran-focused negotiations in Vienna, senior Republicans on four Senate committees sent a letter to the president, warning the administration to “not relinquish its leverage over the Iranian regime just to return to the JCPOA,” or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the nuclear agreement is formally known. Under the original terms of the agreement, the United States would lift some sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran’s compliance with terms limiting its nuclear ambitions.
Republicans have accused Biden — and President Barack Obama before him — of being too deferential to Iran. Those accusations were punctuated this week when the New York Times reported that in a leaked audiotape, Iran’s foreign minister said former secretary of state John F. Kerry told him Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria over 200 times.
Conservative Republicans seized on the news to attack Kerry, who serves on the National Security Council as Biden’s climate envoy, alongside Kahl.
“If these reports are true, John Kerry should resign,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said on the Senate floor Tuesday as he spoke out against Kahl’s nomination. “And if he doesn’t resign, President Biden should fire him.”
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