On Thursday, Louisiana GOP Senator John Kennedy targeted Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to be comptroller of currency, at a Senate hearing, bringing up past statements she had made that smacked of hard-left positions and culminating in saying to her, “I don’t mean any disrespect; I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Kennedy started by asking, “You used to be a member of a group called The Young Communists, didn’t you?”
“Senator, are you referring to my membership in the youth communist organization while I was growing up in the Soviet Union?” Omarova responded.
“I just wanted to ask you that question,” Kennedy stated. “There was a group called The Young Communists, and you were a member, is that right?”
“I’m not exactly sure which group you are referring to,” Omarova replied.
“Well, the formal name of it is the Leninist Communist Young Union of the Russian Federation, and it’s also known as the Leninist Komsomol of the Russian Federation, and it’s commonly referred to as The Young Communists. Were you a member?” Kennedy asked.
Omarova answered, “Senator, I was born and grew up in the Soviet Union.”
“Yes, ma’am, but were you a member of that organization?” Kennedy persisted.
“Everybody in that country was a member of the Komsomol, which was the Communist Youth organization,” she replied.
“So you were a member?” Kenndy asked again.
“That was a part of normal progress in school,” she answered.
“Have you resigned from The Young Communists?” he asked.
“You grow out of it with age automatically,” she answered.
“Did you send them a letter, though, resigning?” Kennedy pressed.
“Senator, this was many, many years ago. As far as I remember how the Soviet Union worked was at certain age, you automatically stop being a member,” she declared.
“Could you look at your records and see if you can find a copy of your —” Kennedy started.
After a brief interruption form Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Kennedy continued, “Would you look at your records and see if you can find a letter of resignation for me?”
“Senator, as I explained, I was part of the Soviet population,” she said.
Then Kennedy launched his attack in which he delineated Omarova’s past hard-left statements:
Yes ma’am, I got that part. I just wanted to see if you looked at your records and see if you find a letter of resignation. I’ve spent a lot of time on your record, and here’s what I found. This is America, you can believe what you want, but we can’t just let anybody be comptroller of the currency.
You wrote your thesis in college at Moscow State University; the title was, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and The Theory of Revolution in The Capital.” But you won’t send Senator Toomey a copy. You studied at university, at Moscow State University, scientific communism, which is the science regarding the working class struggle and the socialist agenda. In 2019, not 30 years ago, in a Canadian documentary, you called the financial services industry “a quintessential ass**** industry.” You wrote a paper called “Systemically Significant Prices” calling for the federal government to set wages, food, gas prices.
In 2020, you wrote a paper called “The People’s Ledger,” where you said we need to abolish bank accounts and make everybody set up an account at the Fed where the federal government will have access to your data. In 2020, you wrote another paper called “The Climate Case for a national Investment Authority,” where you said what we need to do to the oil and gas industry is have the federal government bankrupt them so we can tackle climate change. In 2019, you joined the Facebook group, a Marxist Facebook group, to discuss socialist and anti-capitalist views.
“Now, that’s what I see from your record, and you have the right to believe every one of these things. You do; this is America,” Kennedy asserted, then fired, “But I don’t mean any disrespect; I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Senator John Kennedy to Saule Omarava: “I’m not sure whether to call you professor or Comrade” pic.twitter.com/oYoppgH8jY
— Jewish Deplorable (@TrumpJew2) November 18, 2021