After criticizing him during the Republican primary, Rand Paul went on to praise Donald Trump for questioning the Iraq war. | Getty Rand Paul: 'I’ll do whatever it takes' to stop Bolton from being secretary of state

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday that he is opposed to John Bolton becoming secretary of state and has serious reservations about Rudy Giuliani assuming the same position.

He did not rule out filibustering either potential option in an interview with POLITICO.


“I’ll do whatever it takes to stop someone like John Bolton being secretary of state,” said Paul, himself a former Republican presidential candidate. “He’s opposed to everything Donald Trump ran on: that the Iraq war was a mistake, regime change made us less safe in the Middle East, including in Iraq…I don’t know how a President Trump could appoint someone who’s diametrically opposed to everything Donald Trump ran on. Some of that goes for Giuliani as well.”

Paul, who has a strong libertarian streak, has long favored a less-interventionist foreign policy. He said there was less of a “paper trail” on Giuliani than on Bolton, but said that the former New York City mayor, too, had a record of pushing a more aggressively interventionist foreign policy, which troubled him.

“If you look at Giuliani’s statements, you will find he has advocated bombing Iran, he has advocated for intervention, to my knowledge he’s never admitted the Iraq war was a mistake,” Paul said of Giuliani. “To me, a big part of what Donald Trump said, in hundreds of speeches, was that the Iraq war was a mistake. I don’t know how you could appoint someone to be in charge of the Department of State who believes the Iraq war was a benefit.”

Giuliani is the “narrow favorite” to be secretary of state, POLITICO reported Tuesday, and Paul said he needed to be pressed on his views about the war in Iraq.

Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration as ambassador to the United Nations, is a leading Republican hawk and an avowed opponent of the U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran. Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York on Sept. 11, 2001, has also developed a reputation as a foreign policy hawk who advocates a muscular posture abroad, generating headlines earlier this fall when he said, “anything’s legal” in a war.

Paul is no stranger to pushing back in the Senate on issues related to foreign policy and national security: he filibustered now CIA Director John Brennan for nearly 13 hours in 2013 until he could extract a promise from the Obama administration on domestic drone use. He then placed a hold on James Comey's nomination as FBI director months later over similar concerns.

But it will be difficult for Paul or any other single senator to unilaterally block any of Trump's cabinet appointments. After Democrats nuked the filibuster in 2013, save for a few exceptions like Supreme Court nominees, Senate rules only require 51 votes to break a filibuster and confirm such nominations.

And Paul insisted that his focus was on generating debate.

Opposing Bolton and perhaps Giuliani “would include all of the tools, would include the filibuster as well, but I hate to prematurely offer that up,” he said. “What I’d like to have is a public debate. People need to ask the question… ‘have you learned the lessons of the Iraq war?’”

He launched a crusade against Bolton on Tuesday, blasting him in an op-ed as “a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years — particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president,” and sounding the alarm bells in several interviews.

Asked who he would like to see as secretary of state, Paul demurred, saying that wasn’t his place, but did nod to Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee whose name has also been floated.

“Given the three names—Bolton, Giuliani and Corker—Corker would be much more reasonable, much more realist as far as foreign policy goes,” he said.

After criticizing Trump during the Republican primary, Paul went on to praise him for questioning the Iraq war — though the New York billionaire has never produced evidence that he opposed it from the start.

As he was weighing a presidential campaign of his own last year, Bolton told the Washington Examiner that he stands by his support for ousting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

“I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct," Bolton said. "I think decisions made after that decision were wrong, although I think the worst decision made after that was the 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces."