Impeachment Day 31- Duncan Hunter Missing as Coalition of the Stupid Stages Pizza Party at Hearing
With the President’s blessing, a group of Republican Congressmen invited themselves to sit in on a closed door impeachment-related deposition. We’ve now entered into a new phase of the Trump presidency, one where the facts surrounding his actions are conceded, and disrupting the process is the only tactic available to his defenders.
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz was the ringleader, rounding up 40-plus of his GOP colleagues to put their names on the press release announcing this caper. With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi out of the way due to her brother’s funeral, they were ready to pounce.
San Diego’s Duncan Hunter was included on that list, though I can’t find his mug in any of the photographs taken on Wednesday. Perhaps he was concerned about violating the terms of his bail bond for the 60 counts he’s facing for campaign finance violations.
Some of those on the Gaetz’ list were already authorized to participate in depositions by virtue of the fact they are committee members. And in a few weeks or even days, most of what has gone on in that chamber will be made public, as open hearings commence.
The “secrecy” they were decrying was the procedural rules passed by the Republican-led Congress in 2015 under the leadership of then-Speaker John Boehner.
https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1187105416666324992?s=20
Alert readers will remember Congressman Gaetz as the one who is under investigation by the Florida Bar for threatening former Trump lawyer via (since deleted) tweet prior to his testimony last spring.
"Hey @MichaelCohen212 - Do you wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot…"
Once inside the once-secure venue, a dozen or so Republicans milled about. Some yelled defenses of the President. Others took selfies, creating access to the area by just about any foreign intelligence service with the capabilities of capturing a cell phone.
Some demanded to be arrested, hoping for a place in the history books next to Martin Luther King, Jr. Pizzas were delivered and offered up to the press, only to be left uneaten because reporters actually obeyed the law about not accepting anything of value.
“It’s a bunch of Freedom Caucus members having pizza around a conference table pretending to be brave,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters.
The Democrats in charge of the hearing waited the invaders out, and, after having the room swept for listening devices, got down to questioning Pentagon official Laura Cooper.
The spectacle of the Brooks Brothers Riot 2.0 has provided fodder for just about every wag out there with a sense of humor.
Late Night with Seth Meyers referred to the stunt saying it looked like "like a protest outside a pharmacy that ran out of Viagra."
https://twitter.com/LEBassett/status/1187071950868361218?s=20
Mark Sumner at Daily Kos had a particularly brutal takedown:
Making the whole event even more ridiculous was the fact that a full dozen of the men who were staging a finger-wagging faux sit-in that included sending, “Here I am in a secure area where I’m not even allowed to have a phone!” tweets, popping out every now and then to whine for the cameras, and beating their chests loudly enough to be heard across the Potomac, were on the committees that were there to participate in the hearing. Not only were they not being cut out of this “secret” hearing, but they were participants, able to question the witness.
Even if Wednesday does not become the subject of “Where were you when …?” questioning, it will still be marked down as an important date. Because it was the date on which Republicans surrendered. They surrendered the idea that they could fight the impeachment of Donald Trump on either the facts or the proceedings. And they decided there was only one way left: destroy the institution they were elected to defend.
Molly Jong-Fast, writing at at the Independent, gets credit for coining the “Coalition of the Stupid” title:
Matt Gaetz’s little stunt was never really about transparency, of course. It wasn’t even really about getting in the SCIF with their cellphones and thus compromising its integrity — though perhaps that was an added benefit. And maybe Republicans were happy to delay the testimony of the Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine policy adviser Laura Cooper, since every single day of testimony has brought new allegations of quid pro quo and various other impeachable acts. But that wasn’t the real reason they did it.
No, the real reason Matt Gaetz and “his coalition of the stupid” stormed the SCIF was to try and win the hearts and minds of their Fox News-addicted base. Because impeachment is both a legal and a political process, and these Republicans know that even if Democrats have enough evidence to impeach Trump, getting Republican senators to vote to remove him is all that stands between a President Trump and a President Pence.
Another reason for the storming of SCIF is that as the reality television president, Trump loves reality television show-style stunts and tacky symbolism. Remember, this is the guy who rode down an enormous gold escalator to announce his presidential run. And since the Republican party is now the party of trump all the way down, Congressmen who ingratiate themselves with the president will receive his help on the campaign trail. There’s almost always an opening in trump’s Cabinet, perhaps beyond, and they're aware of that as well.
And in other news….
It’s no big secret that Donald Trump’s inability to keep it in his pants and other “stable genius” moves were buried prior to the 2016 election. But the sheer number of them is kinda amazing, as we learned last night:
The National Enquirer and its former publisher American Media Inc. (AMI) buried around 60 damaging stories about Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Ronan Farrow has claimed.
Farrow told The Late Show's Stephen Colbert Wednesday night that in the process of researching his new book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, he saw for the first time "any journalist has seen it, a master list of all the historical dirt that was about Trump in the AMI archives."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said the list was titled, "Killed stories about Donald Trump," and contained "about 60" stories that AMI acquired and buried in a practice known in the media industry as "catch and kill." Catch and kill refers to media organizations purchasing the rights to potential stories from individuals in order not to publish them, but to keep them secret—usually in concert with the subject of the stories, for example, a powerful figure like Trump.
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Huh.
https://twitter.com/BradMossEsq/status/1187349504175104001?s=20
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