July 12, 2018

The Most Unhinged Moment of the Peter Strzok Hearing Belongs to Louie Gohmert

“You need your medication!”

“You need your medication!” 

That’s what Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) cried out after Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) invoked embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok’s affair with colleague Lisa Page during Thursday’s joint hearing by the House judiciary and oversight committees.

“I can’t help but wonder when I see you looking there with a little smirk, how many times did you look so innocent into your wife’s eye and lie to her about Lisa Page,” Gohmert said, after repeatedly calling Strzok a “disgrace.”

The extraordinary remark prompted swift protest from Democratic committee members, who implored Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House judiciary committee, to rein in Gohmert.

“The credibility of the witness is always an issue,” Gohmert shot back amidst shouts of “outrageous” and “intolerable harassment” from his Democratic colleagues.

The exchange was among several tense moments to emerge from the hearing. Echoing President Donald Trump, House Republicans on Thursday argued that text messages between Strzok and Page demonstrated political bias and perhaps even corruption at the FBI. Democrats have charged Republicans with seizing on the text messages for “propaganda purposes” in order to undermine the ongoing Russia investigation.

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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