{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-dr-rand-paul-announces-opposition-pompeo-haspel-nominations/", "Dr. Rand Paul Announces Opposition to Pompeo, Haspel Nominations", "2018-03-14", "2018", "2018-03", "Republican", "Senate", "KY", "Rand Paul", "P000603", "www.paul.senate.gov", "paul", "https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/", "scraper", "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:\n\nMarch 14, 2018\n\nContact: Press@paul.senate.gov, 202-224-4343\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released the following statement announcing his opposition to the nominations of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be the next Secretary of State and Gina Haspel to take over as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency:\n\n\u201cWhat I liked about candidate Trump was his strong condemnation of the Iraq War. I believe President Trump has done a great job, and I continue to support him, but I cannot endorse his nomination of people who loved the Iraq War so much that they want an Iran War next. Director Pompeo has not learned the lessons of regime change and wants regime change in Iran.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t support people who never understood America First and want to manipulate the President into the sphere of the neocons who never met a war they didn\u2019t want to star in.\n\n\u201cPresident Trump sought to break with the foreign policy mistakes of the last two administrations. Yet now he picks for Secretary of State and CIA Director people who embody them, defend them, and, I\u2019m afraid, will repeat them. I will not support their nominations.\u201d\n\nIn addition to Director Pompeo\u2019s stance on foreign policy, Dr. Paul is also concerned about his previous statements supporting the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, and his support for maintaining and expanding the growing surveillance state, including calling in a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed for Congress to \u201cpass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.\u201d1\n\nDr. Paul believes that Gina Haspel\u2019s record on torture, including running a CIA \u201cblack site\u201d prison in Thailand, should disqualify her from consideration for the position.\n\n###\n\n1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-for-a-rigorous-national-debate-about-surveillance-1451856106", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-06-27T22:52:55Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-dr-rand-paul-announces-opposition-pompeo-haspel-nominations/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.8126913346350193, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}