Ilhan Omar takes Trump’s Venezuela envoy to task over his political past

Rather than being silenced by the controversy around her tweets, Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar emerged swinging at Wednesday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, sharply challenging the Trump administration’s new special envoy to Venezuela over his checkered political career.

Elliott Abrams was appointed US special envoy for Venezuela at the end of January to help coordinate the US response to the political crisis in that country. But his appointment raised concerns for human rights advocates.

Abrams worked as an assistant secretary of state for human rights and assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the Reagan administration, at a time US foreign policy in Latin America destabilized the region. He was widely criticized for shrugging off reports about the massacre of a thousand men, women and children by US-funded death squads in El Salvador.

In 1991, Abrams admitted to withholding information from Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, and was pardoned by President George HW Bush in 1992.

Omar referenced his guilty pleas on Wednesday, saying, “I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”