The Trump administration has been hungrily eyeing Venezuela, reviving the U.S.'s old habit of overthrowing Latin American governments in countries with valuable natural resources. To help with this, Trump has named Elliott Abrams, a man with extensive experience in subverting democracy and enabling mass murder in Latin America, as Special Envoy to Venezuela.

A year ago, his appearance in front of the House Foreign Affairs committee might have been an easy affair, but on Wednesday, Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar wanted to know if Congress could expect even more atrocities from him this time around:

Omar: Mr. Abrams, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.

Abrams: If I could respond to that—

Omar: It wasn't a question.

That sets the tone for the rest of the exchange. Omar goes on to detail some of the horrifying entries on Abrams' resume, including the time he dismissed the worst massacre in modern Latin American history—when the U.S.-trained Salvadoran military killed 800 civilians—as communist propaganda and later referring to American support there as a great achievement.

Despite Abrams' protests, nothing Omar said to him constitutes a personal attack. What she presented was a catalog of things that Abrams has said and done in official government roles in the past, and that includes withholding information from Congress and enabling U.S.-backed genocide in Central America. Considering that he's testifying before Congress for a position where he can sanction even more violence in Venezuela, those seem like pertinent details.

Omar could have gone on much longer enumerating the war crimes that Abrams helped (or tried to help) commit during his time as Assistant Secretary of State. In the 80's, for example, he tried to get Congress to lift sanctions against giving military aid to Guatemala, even while the government was actively trying to ethnically cleanse the country's indigenous Mayan population, and regularly lied about and tried to discredit journalists and human rights advocates who reported on them. The violence and destabilization that Abrams and the U.S. supported is perhaps the single biggest factor still driving immigration from Central America to the U.S.

"Would you support an armed faction within Venezuela," Omar asked, "that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide if you believed they were serving U.S. interests as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua?”

By this point, Abrams fully refused to answer questions on the grounds that they were personal attacks. But to be fair, Omar's questions are part theatrics, an attempt to remind people, Abrams included, of the atrocities he's committed.