CAPITOL CHAOS
GOP POLS STORM IMPEACH PROBE
Republicans are resorting to Occupy Wall Street tactics.
GOP lawmakers seeing red over the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry stormed into a secure hearing room on Capitol Hill Wednesday and staged an hours-long sit-in, delaying a Pentagon official’s planned deposition in the probe and likely violating security protocols.
Led by right-wing Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, roughly two dozen Republicans barged into a House Intelligence Committee room where Laura Cooper, a senior Defense Department official, was supposed to share her information on President Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and other Democrats before the 2020 election.
“We’re going to try to go in there and we’re going to try to figure out what’s going on on behalf of the millions of Americans that we represent,” Gaetz said during a press conference outside the room before rallying the troops and heading in.
The stunt derailed Cooper’s testimony and jeopardized national security, according to Democrats, as many of the Republicans who forced their way into the room refused to give up their cell phones.
“These bogans infiltrated a classified, secure room with commercial cell phones, which is strictly prohibited for security reasons,” a senior Democratic aide told the Daily News.
Nonetheless, some Republicans, including North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker, even tweeted from inside the room, which is especially forbidden.
“UPDATE: We are in the SCIF and every GOP member is quietly listening,” Walker posted midway through the storming, using an acronym for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
Democrats alerted the House sergeant-at-arms and urged the security office to take action against the Republicans.
But Republicans dug in their heels and refused to leave. Eventually, pies of pizza were seen being delivered for the stubborn Republicans holding court in the secure room.
After delaying Cooper’s deposition for roughly five hours, the Republican renegades finally gave up and left, and testimony was underway late Wednesday afternoon.
A congressional source familiar with the matter told The News that President Trump was informed of the Republican revolt beforehand. Bloomberg News reported the president even gave his blessing to the effort during a meeting with GOP lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday.
But Gaetz took sole responsibility for the stunt and claimed Trump had no advanced knowledge of it.
“This is blatantly false,” Gaetz said in a statement. “I organized and led the press conference, including entering the committee room. I wasn’t at the White House meeting yesterday and hadn’t discussed my plans with any White House official — including the president.”
Despite complaints from Gaetz and other Republicans, GOP lawmakers are allowed to participate in all closed-door depositions taken in the impeachment inquiry — they just have to sit on one of the three committees in charge of the probe.
Gaetz sits on the House Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight Committees are leading the impeachment proceedings.
Democrats say the hearings are being held behind closed doors because they are still investigating Trump’s actions and don’t want witnesses to tailor their testimony based on what previous witnesses have said.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (DCalif.) blasted the GOP protest as dangerous “theatrics.”
“We see this as an effort not only to intimidate this witness, but to intimidate future witnesses,” Swalwell said.
It wasn’t immediately clear what light Cooper shed on Trump’s Ukraine scandal.
As with many other administration officials who have been interviewed in the inquiry, Cooper was ordered by her department to blow off the hearing, an aide working on the probe said. She was subsequently served with a subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee and appeared for questioning as planned, the aide said.
Cooper is the Defense Department’s top official in charge of Ukraine policy and may have knowledge of Trump’s decision to put a freeze on more than $391 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine while putting pressure on the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to launch investigations that could benefit him politically.
Cooper’s testimony came one day after Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, told impeachment