The House hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday, despite the director trying to focus on serious topics, was constantly punctuated by Republican lawmakers ranting angrily about the Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed from social media.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who participated in the hearing, pointed out on MSNBC that evening just how bizarre the GOP's fixation with the laptop issue — and what was on it — has really become.
"Absolute chaos is what it had become on the Republican side of the hearing by the time they got to you today," said anchor Lawrence O'Donnell. "What, for you, we're the most important things to take out of that hearing?"
"Well, Lawrence, what I saw was a Trump-appointed FBI director lay out the professionalism and class of his workforce and what they are charged to do — counterterrorism, counterespionage, money laundering, public corruption — and a MAGA party that obsessively went out of their way to defend Donald Trump," said Swalwell.
"Actually, by the time it came to me, it occurred to me that they had said the word 'laptop' so many times that we have actually, I think, missed the forest for the trees as Democrats," Swalwell continued. "We have not called these guys out enough about how weird it is that they are obsessed with somebody's non-consensual nude images on the laptop. We have kind of given them a pass because we don't want to talk about it. But a party that also talked to the director about FISA reauthorization and said, we're not going to reauthorize this surveillance program because it violates the privacy of individual Americans, wants to weaponize the privacy of the president's son for their own political benefit. So I actually thought it was pretty important to focus on that."
"We're never gonna win on the merits of these guys. They're not interested," added Swalwell. "But we should impose a weirdness cost on them, that if they want to talk about the laptop, we are going to say it's kind of creepy that you're talking about this laptop, especially when there were 300-plus mass shootings in America already in July, and you're talking about laptops and not our kids lives."
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