Since the early morning, the House Intelligence Committee has been grilling FBI agent Peter Strzok, the latest boogeyman to be dragged before Trey Gowdy and his gang of deranged goons and sacrificed on the altar of MAGA.
If you’ll recall, Strzok is at the center of a wildly overblown and entirely imaginary scandal concocted by Republicans as a last-ditch attempt to derail and discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Trump and his campaign team’s alleged collusion with agents of the Russian Federation and to throw the spotlight back on to – sigh – Democratic nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her private email server.
Strzok was the FBI agent who led the investigation into the Clinton email server. Since the investigation eventually conceded that Clinton had shown appallingly poor judgment but had not committed any crimes, the discovery of text messages between Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, stating that Donald Trump was an “idiot” who had to “be stopped” was seized upon by Republicans as evidence that Strzok was biased against Trump and let Clinton off the hook.
The hearing has been a circus from the very beginning, but things got very weird this afternoon when notorious Tea Party extremist and prominent white supremacist Louie Gohmert (R-TX) went off the rails, accusing him of lying and then getting disturbingly personal, bringing Strzok’s wife into the discussion in a low blow that had Democrats infuriated.
Dems: "This is intolerable! You need your medication! This is harassment of the witness!"
Gohmert digs in.
And scene (below)
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 12, 2018
The way that the House Republicans have treated of Strzok has been openly hostile and condescending since the very beginning and entirely unbecoming of members of the United States Congress.
Rep @GerryConnolly: "Wow. The American public could be forgiven for mistaking this so-called hearing for a Russian show trial. Its got all the character assassination & cherry-picking facts, and fabrications. It is astounding, and a new low in the U.S. Congress." pic.twitter.com/TBZRmId4VW
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2018
The entire affair is an obvious show trial, a preposterous farce of performative self-righteousness by partisan radicals who have already decided that Strzok is guilty and have reduced themselves to hooting for the cameras in an effort to show the President and their voters that they’re putting in enough effort to make the bad man look guilty.
We can only applaud Strzok for maintaining his composure and for calmly shooting down each and every ball of metaphorical dung that is flung his way.
