Booker to Nielsen: ‘Your silence and your amnesia is complicity’

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as complicit with President Trump for saying she did not hear him say the United States should not accept immigrants from “shithole countries.”

“When ignorance and bigotry is allied with power, it’s a dangerous force in our country. Your silence and your amnesia is complicity,” Booker told Nielsen during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. 

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Nielsen said during questioning at the hearing that it was “possible” Trump used the vulgar term to describe Haiti and other countries during an Oval Office meeting attended by several lawmakers, but she could not hear him using the expletive. 

“It was a meeting of 12 people. There was cross-talk,” Nielsen told the panel. “Anything is possible. I can’t testify to what I don’t know.” 

Booker, an African-American senator, called Trump’s reported remarks “the most vile and vulgar language.”