Biden budget nominee Neera Tanden could face testy hearings amid scrutiny of inflammatory tweets

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Republicans blast Biden nominee for OMB director Neera Tanden

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy has the latest from the transition on 'Special Report'

President Biden's pick for director of the White House Office of Management and Budget could find herself in unfriendly territory when she sits for two confirmation hearings this week after a history of enmity with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Neera Tanden will appear before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday and the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday. She may find herself having to answer for a number of inflammatory tweets against Republicans – messages the Daily Beast reported she deleted in November prior to the announcement of her nomination. Many of those messages have been preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

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"The whole [Republican] party needs to be defeated in November," Tanden said in 2018, blasting the GOP for supporting former President Donald Trump, whom she implied was racist. This was after Trump thanked then-White House chief of staff John Kelly for "firing that dog," in reference to Omarosa Manigault Newman.

In 2017 Tanden also accused the GOP, as well as "everyone who gives money to the RNC," of "gleefully supporting an alleged child molester," in reference to Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who had been accused of sexually assaulting females – including underage girls – in the past.

Tanden has also singled out specific Republican senators. She has referred to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as "MoscowMitch," implying that he was working on behalf of Russia. She also once called Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., "criminally ignorant."

Tanden also went after Collins in October 2018 after the senator said she would vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh despite allegations of sexual misconduct in his teen years brought by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

"Susan Collins’ terrible treatment of Dr. Ford should haunt Collins the rest of her days," Tanden said.

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Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told the New York Post in December after Tanden’s nomination that her past comments could come back to haunt her.

"I think, in light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path," Cornyn told the New York Post.

Tanden also has been at odds with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who chairs the Budget Committee that will host her on Wednesday. The OMB nominee has close ties to Sanders’ 2016 primary opponent Hillary Clinton.

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During the presidential primary race in 2019, Sanders wrote a fiery letter to the Center for American Progress, which Tanden led, accusing her of "maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas." 

The Vermont senator, a self-described democratic socialist, also criticized a video by ThinkProgress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which accused him of changing his rhetoric on wealthy Americans after he became a millionaire in 2016. 

Fox News’ Megan Henney and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.