The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold its confirmation hearing for Elbridge Colby’s nomination to be undersecretary of defense for policy, the No. 3 job in the Pentagon, next Tuesday, March 4, the committee’s chairman told Jewish Insider on Monday. 

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who chairs the Armed Services Committee, told JI in the Capitol that he planned to announce the hearing soon. The scheduling announcement comes one week after Wicker confirmed publicly that Republicans have “concerns” about Colby’s nomination. 

At least four GOP senators who sit on Armed Services have reached out to President Donald Trump, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, or other top White House officials to voice their reservations about Colby’s foreign policy views — particularly his past support for accommodation of a nuclear Iran.

A fifth Republican senator, who is not a member of the committee but has a close relationship with the White House, has also reached out to the administration to express similar concerns about Colby and several other isolationist picks at the Pentagon, specifically Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Michael DiMino and senior advisor Dan Caldwell. 

One Republican senator told JI that Colby tried, during a private meeting, to distance himself from some of the administration’s controversial picks. The senator added that they didn’t expect many Republican lawmakers to push back strongly against Colby, but noted that the administration had spent significant political capital confirming other controversial nominees.

Another Senate Republican said that they believe Colby is working to address concerns raised in his private meetings on the Hill, as previous controversial nominees did before being confirmed.

“We can work past those issues, but we’ve just got to sit down and talk to [the nominees], and he’s doing that,” the senator said.

Colby has said that the U.S. should pull back militarily from the Middle East and do less to counter Iran and its proxies, and that the U.S. could contain a nuclear-armed Iran. Despite telling skeptical senators that he holds these views because he believes the U.S. should be primarily focused on combating China, Colby has also raised questions about whether the U.S. can and would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a military escalation with China.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was the only committee Republican who offered some window into their approach to Colby’s confirmation hearing. “I want to ask him about his public positions and if there’s any daylight between him and what Trump believes,” Scott told JI. 

Wicker declined to say what questions he was planning to ask Colby at the hearing, as did several other Armed Services Republicans.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) was coy about his plans, saying that he was looking forward to hearing what Colby had to say, but declining to say what he planned to ask about.

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) said that he’d had a “great” meeting with Colby several weeks ago, but didn’t elaborate on what he was hoping to ask him at his hearing.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Democrats would likely focus their questioning on the “potential tectonic shift in American foreign policy” from the Trump administration’s position on Ukraine, “siding with the Russians and causing chaos in NATO, and the question of ‘How does that help us?’”

Asked about their private meeting, Reed called Colby “a very intelligent person. And we’ll see.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said she plans to ask Colby “about the role of China and the connection that has to what we do in Ukraine, in terms of what [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] is looking for the future of Taiwan.” She said they’d had a “good discussion.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said that his questions for Colby would likely echo their discussion in his office, focused on the western Pacific and Indo-Pacific Command issues.