THE TOPLINE: President Trump’s pick for Air Force secretary was on Capitol Hill Thursday for her Senate nomination hearing, skirting questions from Democrats over her work as a defense industry consultant with a Lockheed Martin subsidiary.
Democrats questioned why there wasn’t documentation of her work in that role.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) repeatedly asked former Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) about her time working for Sandia Corp. as a consultant, and Wilson repeatedly sought to dodge those questions.
Sandia Corp. manages and runs Sandia National Laboratories, research and development labs owned by the Department of Energy (DOE). In 2013, the DOE inspector general found Sandia paid Wilson’s consulting company $464,000 from 2009 to 2011 with no evidence of work. Wilson denied the findings, but the government was reportedly paid back about $443,000.
Under federal acquisition regulation laws, Wilson should have kept documentation of her consulting work — which she said was about 50 hours a month or more. But she repeatedly avoided direct answers about actual proof of the consulting work.
Despite the hard line of questioning, members largely praised her nomination and signaled a likely unanimous confirmation.
AIR FORCE NOMINEE BACKS F-35 OVER F-18: In the wide-ranging nomination hearing Thursday, Wilson all but canceled out President Trump’s previous threats to replace the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 with Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet, saying the Boeing jet didn’t have a needed stealth capability.
She told the Senate Armed Services Committee she believed that the Air Force could not give F-18 fighter jets the same stealth capabilities the F-35 already holds.
“I don’t think you can do [that] with an F-18 or an F-15 or an F-16, to give it stealth capability retroactively,” she told lawmakers during her nomination hearing.
Trump in December criticized the F-35 costs as “out of control,” and wrote on Twitter that he had asked Boeing to price out a competitive alternative with its F/A-18.
TRUMP GIVES MILITARY MORE AUTHORITY IN SOMALIA: President Trump is giving the Pentagon more authority to carry out airstrikes in Somalia.
“The president has approved a Department of Defense proposal to provide additional precision fires in support of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali security forces operations to defeat al-Shabaab in Somalia,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis confirmed in a statement Thursday.
The statement comes after several news outlets reported earlier in the day that Trump had relaxed rules meant to safeguard against civilian casualties to allow for increased operations in the Horn of Africa country.
The changed rules in Somalia could renew questions that have dogged the Trump administration about mission creep and civilian casualties.
DEMS WANT ANSWERS ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) is demanding answers from Defense Secretary James Mattis on a reported increase in civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria.
“The American public deserves to know what is going on in Syria and Iraq,” Lieu wrote in a four-page letter to Mattis released Thursday that listed 19 questions for the secretary. “The apparently large numbers of children and civilian adults being killed by U.S. forces is not acceptable.”
Pentagon officials have acknowledged that a U.S. airstrike was at least partially responsible for a building collapse in west Mosul that reportedly killed more than 200 people. But they’ve also said that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could have done something to cause the building to collapse.
In his letter, Lieu said the reports of civilian casualties call into question whether Trump is violating the law of war. He also cited Trump’s campaign comments promising to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS” and “take out their families.”
