Green demands Abbott say who misled him on Uvalde
U.S. Rep. Al Green on Monday demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott identify the source of false information that prompted the governor to initially praise the police response to the Uvalde school shooting, which was later found to be rife with errors and interagency finger-pointing.
Green, a Democrat from southwest Houston, has been one of Abbott’s most vocal critics in the weeks since the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. If Abbott doesn’t disclose who provided false information to him, Green suggested he will seek a congressional investigation into the matter.
The day after the massacre, Abbott described a heroic law enforcement effort to contain a classroom shooting spree that he said “could have been worse.” After it was revealed that police waited for more than an hour before breaching the room and confronting the shooter, Abbott said he was “misled” about the response, adding that he was “absolutely livid” about the inaccuracies.
Since then, Abbott has released handwritten notes outlining the details he received before his May 25 press conference, when he relayed the inaccurate account of the police response to the public. But Abbott has declined to reveal who misinformed him.
If Abbott continues to withhold the sources, Green said, he may ask U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, to conduct an investigation into the shooting and call Abbott as a witness — where he would be compelled to testify under oath.
“We can have hearings, and we can call witnesses. We just recently found that persons who decide that they’re going to ignore congressional hearings can be prosecuted,” Green said, an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s former political adviser, Steve Bannon, who was convicted last week on two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Green continued, “I hope the governor got that message, because at some point, if the governor does not give us the names, I think that we’ll make a request that the Judiciary Committee hold a hearing and have the governor as a witness at the hearing.”
He said he has “not made that appeal to date, but I have not ruled it out.”