NEW YORK, N.Y. – Today, Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went on FOX 5 to discuss the relations with the NATO Summit, the upcoming Trump-Putin meeting and the Supreme Court vacancy, among other topics.

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On NATO and Trump’s upcoming meeting with Putin

“When he goes to NATO, which is the significant security architecture of our country in the Transatlantic Alliance and disrupts it, when he calls for changing the Prime Minister of Great Britain as he’s visiting her (…) and when he says that his upcoming meeting with Putin is maybe the ‘easiest’ one he’ll have, well, someone who tried to undo our democracy through cyber attacks, someone who is in my view a thug, someone who the president calls a competitor –I call a foe– shouldn’t be a chummy or easy meeting whatsoever.”

“The president is great at misdirection. There is no NATO country who’s in arrears, none, zero. There’s a goal in 2024 hit that 2% target, eight of the NATO countries are actually going to meet it this year in 2018, so the reality is that Putin loves to disrupt the West, he made a great investment in the elections of 2016 when he helped Donald Trump according to all of our intelligence agencies.”

“I wouldn’t be asking Putin about his cyber attacks when all of the president’s own intelligence agencies, when the bipartisan Committee of the Senate Intelligence said that Putin interfered in our elections and did it in support of the president, I wouldn’t be asking him, I would be telling him to knock it off and here’s the consequences if you continue to engage as our intelligence agencies are saying. In this election cycle, Russia is engaging.”

On the Supreme Court Vacancy

“I’ve seen what Judge Kavanaugh’s record is first of all if it comes off the Heritage Foundation’s list, the Heritage Foundation opposes a woman’s right to make her own decisions on reproductive health, permits greater gun freedom in our country instead of reasonable gun safety laws, ultimately wants to eliminate the Affordable Care Act that bought a million New Jerseyans health insurance who didn’t’ have it before and for 3.8 million New Jerseyans who have pre-existing conditions meaning they had an illness that previously excluded them from getting health insurance.”

“His decisions already as a DC appeal court judge gives me plenty of insight as to where he is headed. He even says that the President of the United States can determine what laws are constitutional or not and therefore disobey a law if he believes it’s unconstitutional. That’s what the courts are about, not what the executive branch is about, so this may have been president Trump’s get-out-of-jail card with this nomination.”