Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit back Thursday after Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) accused her of supporting “Soviet style secret hearings in the Capitol basement.”
Mooney accused Ocasio-Cortez of not supporting “Open and Transparent government” after she noted that many of the group of Republican representatives who disrupted a House deposition in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility were members of the committee and thus would know electronic devices were not allowed in the room.
{mosads}“Rep. Mooney, you & I both know that when a massive crime is committed, the 1st step is to separate witnesses & get their stories to see what adds up,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. “You know that making these depositions public will help potential criminals line up their testimony. Why do you want to do that?”
Mooney was one of the nearly two dozen GOP representatives involved in the action, which was led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of President Trump’s most vocal defenders in the House.
Republicans, including those who entered the SCIF Wednesday, have raised objections to the number of closed-door hearings conducted by the House as part of its impeachment inquiry, while Democrats have invoked the possibility of coordinated testimony if the hearings were open to the public.
However, mindful of the threat of further disruptions, House Democrats are considering taking the hearings public as early as mid-November, according to a Washington Post report Wednesday evening.
“It’s going to be the difference between reading a dry transcript and actually hearing the story from the people who were in the room,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Post.
“I think the story needs to be told, you know, the story of the abuse of power. … People like the various ambassadors who have come to testify need to come tell it,” he added.