Tom Cotton

In Iraq, he led a 41-man air Assault infantry platoon in the 506th Infantry Regiment, and planned and performed daily combat patrols.

In response to the article, Democratic congressman Jason Crow, who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, criticized Cotton for calling himself a Ranger.

Thomas Bryant Cotton (born May 13, 1977) is an American politician, attorney, and former military officer serving as the junior United States senator from Arkansas since 2015.

Thomas Bryant Cotton was born on May 13, 1977, in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

His father, Thomas Leonard "Len" Cotton, was a district supervisor in the Arkansas Department of Health, and his mother, Avis ( Bryant) Cotton, was a schoolteacher who later became principal of their district's middle school.

Cotton's family had lived in rural Arkansas for seven generations, and he grew up on his family's cattle farm.

He attended Dardanelle High School, where he played on the local and regional basketball teams; standing 6ft 5in tall, he was usually required to play center.

Cotton was accepted to Harvard College after graduating from high school in 1995.

At Harvard, he majored in government and was a member of the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, often dissenting from the liberal majority.

In articles, Cotton addressed what he saw as "sacred cows" such as affirmative action.

He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 after only three years of study.

Cotton's senior thesis focused on The Federalist Papers.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1998, Cotton was accepted into a master's program at Claremont Graduate University.

He left in 1999, saying that he found academic life "too sedentary", and instead enrolled at Harvard Law School.

He graduated with a J.D. degree in 2002.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Cotton spent one year as a law clerk for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

He then went into private practice as an associate at law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C., until he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2005.

On January 11, 2005, Cotton enlisted in the United States Army.

He entered Officer Candidate School (OCS) in March 2005 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June.

He completed the U.S. Army Ranger Course, a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership program that earned him the Ranger tab, and Airborne School to earn the Parachutist Badge.

In May 2006, Cotton was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division.

In December 2006 Cotton was promoted to first lieutenant and reassigned to the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, as a platoon leader.

In June 2006, while stationed in Iraq, Cotton gained public attention after writing an open letter to the editor of The New York Times, asserting three journalists had violated "espionage laws" by publishing an article detailing a classified government program monitoring terrorists' finances.

The Times did not publish Cotton's letter, but it was published on Power Line, a conservative blog that had been copied on the email.

In the letter, Cotton called for the journalists to be prosecuted for espionage "to the fullest extent of the law" and incarcerated.

He accused the newspaper of having "gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis".

Cotton's claims circulated online and were reprinted in full elsewhere.

From October 2008 to July 2009, Cotton was deployed to eastern Afghanistan.

He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – East at its Gamberi forward operating base (FOB) in Laghman Province as the operations officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), where he planned daily counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations.

Cotton was honorably discharged in September 2009.

During his time in the service, he completed two combat deployments overseas, was awarded a Bronze Star, two Army Commendation Medals, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal, and an Iraq Campaign Medal.

Following his active duty service, Cotton went to work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

In July 2010, Cotton entered the Army Reserve (USAR).

According to Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University in 2011, the Espionage Act has never been used against journalists.

Rosen argued accusing investigative journalists of engaging in espionage is "essentially saying that they’re working for another power, or aiding the enemy. That is culture war tactics taken to an extreme."

In 2021, Salon reported that Cotton falsely claimed in campaign ads and videos from 2011 to 2014 that he had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and earned a Bronze Star as a U.S. Army Ranger even though he did not serve in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment.

Fact-checking site Snopes rated Salon's reporting as true.

Cotton was elected as the U.S. representative for Arkansas's 4th congressional district in 2012 and to the Senate at age 37 in 2014, defeating two-term Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor.

A member of the Republican Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2015.

He was discharged in May 2013.