A Twitter account run by the House GOP caucus had a rough night on Thursday amid the final hearing of the January 6 committee’s first bloc of meetings.
The official account run by House Republicans tweeted shortly after Thursday’s hearing began that the testimony of Sarah Matthews and others was “all hearsay”.
Except that wasn’t the word they used: The account actually labeled the committee hearing “heresy” against Donald Trump, whose thumb the House GOP has remained under since January 2021.
That tweet elicited humorous reactions from viewers, who questioned if the GOP’s Twitter account had revealed a little more about Republican fealty to Donald Trump than intended.
“AMAZING Freudian slip from the House GOP. (I assume they meant hearsay, lol),” tweeted Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who penned a now-infamous op-ed announcing a “resistance” within the government.
“The House GOP has a better grasp of heresy than hearsay, so this could be right,” added Ken White, an attorney and founder of the Popehat legal blog.
Their jokes were one reaction; others simply honed in on the ongoing efforts of the House GOP caucus to openly lie about the committee’s hearings and testimony displayed during them.
Much of Thursday’s hearing involved first-hand accounts from White House staffers like Cassidy Hutchinson and Pat Cipollone. The hearing also included radio transmissions from terrified Secret Service agents worried about their own safety and that of Mike Pence; according to an anonymous official, some agents even left messages for family members worrying that they would not return.
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, tweeted that the characterisation of the hearing by Republicans was “borrowed from Stalin’s Politburo”.
House Republican leadership has worked to sow doubt about the committee’s intent since its inception when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his own nominees from the panel and left it controlled by Democrats and two GOP members who have very publicly spurned the Trump wing of the GOP with their participation.
GOP figures frequently and dishonesly characterise the panel’s investigation as a political witch hunt being led by Democrats when in reality almost all of the witnesses who have offered testimony have been Republicans.
