Former head of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Raymond Thomas slammed Rep. Jason Crow for questioning Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton’s military service.
Attacks on Cotton’s decorated service in the Army began to pour in across liberal Twitter in the wake of a Salon report that alleged the Arkansas senator improperly referenced himself as an Army Ranger in campaign materials.
Crow tweeted at Cotton that “unless you wore one of these Berets, you shouldn’t be calling yourself a ranger.”
Cotton graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School, the Army’s premier leadership and small unit tactics course which earned him a Ranger Tab before serving in combat with the 101st Airborne.
Crow served in the 75th Ranger Regiment which falls under SOCOM.
Ret. General Thomas, himself a former member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, shot down Crow’s petty attack on Cotton’s service.
First, wear your beret correctly. Second, you are a Congressman now, act like it. This is a dumb debate (feel pretty qualified to say that). Need you to focus on more important things for the good of the nation. You and @SenTomCotton get together and work like “Ranger buddies.” https://t.co/9r3vCjGOXt
— Tony Thomas (@TonyT2Thomas) January 24, 2021
Members of both the 75th Ranger Regiment and graduates of U.S. Army Ranger School are routinely referred to as “Rangers,” sometimes interchangeably by service members.
In 2015, Maj. Gen. Scott Miller, who commanded the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, told a class of Ranger School graduates — which included two women graduates for the first time – that they earned the Ranger title.
“You carry the title of Ranger. From here on out, your subordinates, your peers, your leaders, will always expect you to be able to handle the toughest tasks,” Miller said at the time.
Former regimental sergeant major of the 75th Ranger Regiment Rick Merritt also came to Cotton’s defense.
Retired Command Sgt. Maj. Rick Merritt […] told Arkansas Online over the weekend that attacks against Cotton for his service are “absurd,” “unfair,” and “almost slanderous.”
“He’s 100 percent a Ranger. … He will always be a Ranger,” Merritt said. “An attack on him is an attack on every veteran who has served honorably.”
According to New York Times reporter Nick Confessore what constitutes a “Ranger” is fairly subjective within the military, but some people are real “a-holes about it.”
Your friend is correct
— Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) January 25, 2021
Here’s how the absurd hit piece eventually blew up in Crow’s face.
Cotton’s staff provided an email chain to the Washington Free Beacon from the Salon reporter when he was requesting comment from their office.
This is where the story took a rather hilarious turn.
In his email request, Sollenberger included a link to a Google drive containing video clips of Cotton allegedly stealing valor. Access to the drive was controlled by a woman identified as Michelle Pettigrew, who asked Cotton’s communications director, “Do you want me to make this public?” Moments later, Pettigrew followed up: “Sorry, I meant to send this to someone else!”
Pettigrew’s Linkedin identifies her as the principal of San Francisco firm called Original Sources, which she describes as “a highly accomplished investigative researcher” and boasts she’s the force behind investigative pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other pubs.
A Free Beacon investigation revealed Pettigrew has connections to left-wing news sources and is a dyed in the wool Limousine Liberal.
One of the first employees at the online-auction company Onsale, Pettigrew struck gold—literally—when she married her boss, Onsale cofounder and CEO Jerry Kaplan.
While Cotton was serving in the lowly 101st Airborne in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s, Kaplan and Pettigrew were busy renovating their multimillion-dollar San Francisco mansion—adding an outdoor swimming pool, a life-sized chess set, a custom-designed chicken coop, and a “farmer’s-market-inspired edible garden enclosed by a white fence” to the Georgian colonial.
This is the real Jason Crow, the one who is not above debasing himself by gratuitously peddling partisan garbage from wealthy San Francisco libs with chess sets on their lawns.
It’s altogether disgusting Crow would use his own service to impugn someone else’s simply because Cotton is a Republican.
Crow’s office has thus far declined to explain why he questioned Cotton’s service.
Should Crow muster the wherewith-all and issue a response to General Thomas, we will update this post.