House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) lost his temper during a hearing on Tuesday when Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) pressed him on whether there would be any investigation into why the Trump administration gave a sweetheart prison transfer to convicted Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
"The question was whether you would hold a hearing as to why she was transferred—" began Fernández.
"We'll have a hearing," cut in Comer. "We'll have a hearing, and if someone wants to ask that question, they can ask it."
"So the answer is no?" said Fernández.
"We'll have a hearing," repeated Comer.
"But that wasn't a hearing on what the question was," said Fernández.
"You want to have a whole hearing, a whole entire hearing, not about the victims, not about a government coverup, not about human trafficking, but about Maxwell being — who you all were like, begging to be deposed ... now you're mad because she exonerated Trump. We brought in Bill Barr, who is no, I don't think it's any secret that he and Trump aren't best of friends, and he—"
"I'm going to reclaim my time," said Fernández. "The question wasn't about should we do all these things. But this is something very specific that indeed, as I understand, the victims raised today their outrage that this has happened, and it is indeed a retraumatization when somebody who has done such a horrible thing is then treated favorably."
Maxwell's interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was controversial from the start, as Trump's own prosecutors had branded Maxwell a habitual liar whose testimony couldn't be trusted. Her subsequent transfer to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, was against the Federal Bureau of Prisons' own policy on how to handle convicted sex offenders.
Nevertheless, some pro-Trump pundits have grown more favorable toward Maxwell as it became clear she leveraged Trump's political crisis to offer favorable testimony about him in exchange for better treatment in the prison system; Newsmax host Greg Kelly even suggested Maxwell might herself be a victim, even though many of Epstein's victims testified she sexually assaulted them herself.
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