Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, in the battle for his life in a purple district to keep his seat went all partisan Tuesday after the State of the Union.
WASHINGTON — A VA spokeswoman chided U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman on Monday for statements the Aurora Republican made recently in which he imagined the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs running the terrorist group ISIS.
His “comments do not belong in our public discourse,” said VA spokeswoman Victoria Dillon in a statement. “Veterans and VA employees find them highly offensive. (VA) Secretary (Robert) McDonald has spoken to Representative Coffman.”
In a last week, Coffman tried to make the point that the VA is run inefficiently. But in doing so, he awkwardly linked the VA with ISIS — and the group’s barbaric practice of decapitation.
“It’s too bad we can’t take VA leadership and export it and give it to some of our adversaries around the planet. Let them suffer under VA’s leadership,” Coffman said in the interview.
“They’d probably say: ‘Oh, you know if wasn’t quite 2,000 that we beheaded, it was really 24,” he added. “And we’re sorry that, in fact, they were all our own terrorists that we beheaded because they got misclassified in the system as Christians.”
Coffman long has criticized the VA for its management, especially since the agency revealed that the cost of a new VA hospital in Aurora had ballooned to $1.73 billion — far beyond its initial estimate.
