Republicans, who had planned to grill former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her relationship with late financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, made a serious fumble that has now backfired, an analyst revealed Friday.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) had anticipated Clinton's closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee would bring his "dream witness in front of them," but the photo taken by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and then sent and posted by MAGA influencer Benny Johnson violated the committee's rules. The move ultimately sabotaged what GOP lawmakers hoped to achieve, Salon's Sophia Tesfaye explained.
"It was supposed to be the Republican Party‘s ultimate revenge fantasy," Tesfaye wrote. "They wanted the base to salivate over the idea that, at long last, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee would be forced to answer tough questions. Instead, thanks to their own hubristic overreach and compulsive need for social media clout, the whole thing quickly imploded."
The disruption instead had a crippling impact.
"The committee’s own rules, read aloud at the start of the proceedings, explicitly prohibited photography inside the room," Tesfaye wrote. "The hearing abruptly went off the record as staff scrambled to figure out who had violated House rules. Clinton’s adviser Nick Merrill stepped outside to inform the waiting press, directing reporters to check Johnson’s social media feed to see exactly what had happened. The secretary’s team, which had been pushing for a fully public proceeding from the very beginning — the committee had rejected that request — suddenly had an unambiguous example that Republicans can’t even handle a closed-door session without leaking to their propagandists."
It changed the direction of what Republicans had hoped for, and prompted questions over what GOP lawmakers hoped to achieve.
"This deposition was supposed to be Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s big shot: a marquee moment in the long-running effort to re-litigate the Clinton era and tie it to Epstein in the public imagination," Tesfaye explained. "Instead, it became a cautionary tale about the perils of governing-by-influencer. In the end, Boebert and Johnson did more than briefly derail a deposition. They exposed the hollowness at the core of this latest Clinton crusade. When your investigation can be derailed by a thirst for retweets, it was never about truth in the first place."