Incoming Republican Senate Intelligence Chair Once Called for Journalists to Be Prosecuted for Espionage

Republican Senator Tom Cotton is set to become the chair of the Upper House's Intelligence Committee, a critical national security position in Congress. His elevation comes as Marco Rubio, who currently holds the position, is poised to become Donald Trump's next secretary of state. Cotton is also seeking to become the next Senate Republican Conference chair, a post that would place him among the highest-profile lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to Congressional reporter Jake Sherman.

Cotton is serving his second term as the junior senator from Arkansas since 2015. Before, he was a representative for two years. After graduating from Harvard and a brief law career, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, being deployed to Baghdad in 2006.

In that year Cotton saw himself involved in a controversy that still makes the rounds two decades later: he penned a letter to The New York Times calling for three journalist to be prosecuted for espionage.

Concretely, Cotton said that the three journalists had violated "espionage laws" for publishing an article revealing a classified government program monitoring the finances of terrorist groups and individuals. Known as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) it allowed the U.S. to access financial transactions on the SWIFT network as part of the George W. Bush's War on Terrorism. The disclosure of the practice led to a negotiation between the U.S. and the EU for the former to access the SWIFT database.

The NYT did not publish the letter, which called for the journalists to be prosecuted to the "fullest extent of the law" and put in prison. He also accused the outlet, which shared the scoop with the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal, of having "gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis".

The letter was then published on Power Line, a conservative blog that was copied on the email. "Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance," read another passage of the scathing letter, which closed out by wishing the DOJ prosecute the journalists. "By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars."

Cotton and the NYT also dominated headlines in 2020 when the senator wrote an op-ed calling for then-President Donald Trump to deploy the military and quell the riots taking place across the country in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

Several journalists from the paper itself criticized the decision, many of them saying that Black staffers were put in danger by the piece. NYT Publisher A.G. Sulzberger backtracked on an initial defense of the piece, saying it was a result of a "rushed editorial process." Two members of the section were pushed out as a result and another one reassigned to a different department.