When U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO) was asked about his response to the Trump administration capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without briefing members of Congress, he didn’t have any issue with it. In fact, he defended the decision to keep Congress out of the loop.
In a Jan. 5 appearance on KHOW Radio’s The Dan Caplis Show, a conservative talk radio program, Crank insinuated that a fellow member of the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), was unable to maintain the confidential status of briefings — without offering any supporting evidence.
“I’m in classified briefings probably, you know, every other week, at least, and sometimes several in a week, but they have these briefings where they have all the members come in, and we had one on the drug boat issue maybe a month ago. And I just sit there, and it was Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, and others were there,” Crank said on air. “And in the room is Ilhan Omar. And I’m thinking to myself, why would they say anything in this setting of a classified nature? I mean, it’s just a waste of time.”
In March of last year, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio were involved in an incident in which information on classified military operations was mistakenly leaked to a member of the press. Both Hegseth and Rubio were members of the private Signal chat to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added by accident while plans for US strikes in Yemen were being discussed. Hegseth has been implicated in other leaks in the months since.
Neither Crank nor Omar has responded to Colorado Times Recorder’s requests for comment at the time of publication. This story will be updated with any response received.
Later in the interview, Crank also made remarks that implied he believed that President Trump has the legal right to forcibly extradite any foreign citizen who has violated U.S. law.
“What if it’s a child sex trafficker in Venezuela who also doesn’t happen to be the leader of Venezuela? Does America have the right to go in and grab that person and bring them to justice? Of course the president does,” said Crank.
Extradition is a complicated legal process that requires close cooperation with foreign legal systems and is strictly governed by both international treaties and U.S. law.
The comments come as the Trump Administration employs increasingly hostile rhetoric against several other countries and territories in the Western Hemisphere, including Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and Greenland.
Crank, entering the second and final year of his first congressional term, will be running for reelection this year. He is currently unopposed for the Republican nomination in June’s primary.
