TRS Staff

Republican candidate Denver Riggleman and Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn sparred at a debate on Monday night in front of a crowd at Piedmont Virginia Community College. During the exchange between the two hopefuls to represent Virginia’s Fifth District, Cockburn came out in support of a U.S.-Taliban negotiation which she says will end the War in Afghanistan, all the while being highly critical of her Republican opponent’s military service.

When asked about the economic situation in the Central Virginia congressional district, Cockburn sidestepped the question to say, “I’d like to address the issue of Afghanistan.”

“I covered three different wars in Afghanistan,” she said, reiterating her investigative journalism experience in foreign wars.

“As for what should be done in Afghanistan right now, we’ve been there 17 years,” Cockburn said. “My friend John Sopko, who is the inspector general, tells us that we’ve spent nearly a trillion dollars on that war and we are definitely not winning it.”

“One problem is that the patron of the Taliban is Pakistan,” Cockburn added. “We have to negotiate with the Taliban and Pakistan in order to leave that war, and I think that this should be a matter of diplomacy, and it needs to happen now.”

She attacked Riggleman, an Air Force veteran, saying that “Denver was not in Afghanistan.” Cockburn explained that he was “3,000 miles away from Afghanistan,” where he was strategizing to conduct bombing missions in the country while at a U.S. naval base at Diego Garcia, implying that he played a minor role.

Furthermore, Cockburn said that Riggleman’s work was unsuccessful in pushing back Taliban forces.

“The bombings didn’t become successful until you had special forces on the ground calling in airstrikes,” she said.

Riggleman replied that he was happy to work with those on the ground in Afghanistan on the airstrikes and doesn’t need to defend his service.

“We worked with the joint forward air controllers in Afghanistan…it’s hard to answer this in a way that doesn’t sound emotional,” Riggleman said. “I’m not going to defend my military service because of what I’ve done.”

“Those JFAC [Joint Force Air Component] strikes on the caves? Yeah, that was us. But I do appreciate the try,” Riggleman responded to Cockburn.

After weeks of incredulous and offensive sexual assault allegations used to derail the confirmation process for then-D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, following the 50-48 Senate vote to confirm him, the news Supreme Court justice’s first action was to hire an all-female staff of law clerks, the first in U.S. history to do so. For over a decade on the federal court, a majority of the law clerks he hired were women, showing his attitude towards women in the workplace has been long carried out.

“My women law clerks said I was one of the strongest advocates in the federal judiciary for women lawyers,” Kavanaugh said to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the hearing weeks ago, according to The Washington Post. He added, “And they wrote that the legal profession is fairer and more equal because of me.”

Justice Kavanaugh also explained that he has made a special effort to hire women after reading a story years ago about the unequal balance between men and woman hired for reputable clerk positions at the U.S. Supreme Court and for other federal judges. Moreover, Kavanaugh told senators that if he was to be confirmed, he had to hire “a first group of four law clerks who could be available to clerk at the Supreme Court for me on a moment’s notice.”

During his 12 years on the federal bench, “no federal judge — not a single one in the country — has sent more women law clerks to clerk on the Supreme Court than I have,” Kavanaugh said. Of the positions that are to be filled, he said during the hearing, “All four are women. If confirmed, I’ll be the first justice in the history of the Supreme Court to have a group of all-women law clerks. That is who I am.”

The new clerks for Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court are:

Kim Jackson: A Yale graduate who worked for Kavanaugh on the appeals court. She is also one the three African-Americans clerking at the Supreme Court this term, two of whom previously worked for Kavanaugh.

Shannon Grammel: A Harvard graduate and former president of the Stanford Law Review who was recently clerking for the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Megan Lacy: A University of Virginia graduate and former counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA). She was also part of the White House team that worked on Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Sara Nommensen: A Harvard graduate and student of Kavanaugh’s who worked at the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel.