Rep. Jasmine Crockett was attending a House Oversight Committee hearing last fall and was growing increasingly frustrated as she listened to Republicans accuse President Biden of criminal conduct without providing evidence when an idea occurred to her.
Ms. Crockett, a freshman Democrat from Texas and a former defense attorney, summoned an aide and asked him to quickly print out a stack of photos showing the boxes of sensitive government documents hidden in a toilet at Mar-a-Lago. Former President Donald J. Trump’s Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Moments later, Ms. Crockett waved the photos above her head and accused Republicans of ignoring clear evidence that Mr. Trump had broken the law while making allegations against Mr. Biden for which they had provided no evidence.
“When we start talking about things that look like evidence, they want to act like they’re blind,” Ms. Crockett said of Republicans, spitting out her words with a mix of outrage and confusion. “These are our national secrets,” she added, apparently in a toilet, using a swear word to describe the plumbing.
The moment spread widely on social media. The White House took notice. So did senior Democrats in the House of Representatives. Suddenly, it was Ms. Crockett, and not the Republicans pursuing Mr. Biden, who captured the public’s attention.
The appearance is something of a hallmark of Republicans’ sputtering efforts to impeach Mr. Biden, which have stalled in recent weeks as Republicans have failed in their efforts to bolster their claims of wrongdoing by the president.
As Republicans advance their case against Mr. Biden, Democrats on the oversight panel — including an unusually large number of freshmen — have matched them note for note and stunt for political stunt, establishing themselves as vigorous defenders of the president.
It’s a strategy that Democrats began planning more than a year ago. Back in January 2023, they selected seven first-year students for the supervisory board, more than any other board. The group included lawyers with debate experience and members who had a sense of how to communicate in a way that would resonate on social media and cut through the noise of a highly polarized environment.
The result was that the impeachment process, designed by Republicans to damage Mr. Biden politically, instead raised the profile of a group of embattled first-term Democrats who have become fixtures in the House Oversight Committee’s partisan scrum.
In addition to Ms. Crockett, there is Representative Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor from New York who has made it his mission to beat Republicans to the microphones outside of closed-door depositions and to formulate testimony before his Republican rivals can.
California Rep. Robert Garcia peppered his remarks with cheeky pop culture references that have gained traction on social media and drawn attention to Democrats’ defense.
And Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida has earned a reputation as the primary opponent of Rep. James R. Comer, who is leading the investigation as chairman of the committee. Mr. Moskowitz has repeatedly gotten under Mr. Comer’s skin with disrespectful tactics, including once wearing a mask of President Vladimir V. Putin at a hearing to mock him as a puppet of Russia. Biden likely would have struggled to gain momentum. Their leaders have never been able to produce the kind of evidence needed to convince mainstream and swing district members to move forward with impeachment, a crucial task given their slim majority. And their investigation suffered a near-fatal blow when a key informant was accused of fabricating his story about Mr. Biden taking bribes.
Many Republicans now admit that their push to impeach Mr. Biden is all but dead, and Mr. Comer has instead turned to investigating possible criminal references, which he has called “the culmination of my investigation.”
Democrats argue that their strategy was instrumental in causing the company to fail. They fought with Republicans over the facts, tried to shift the focus on Mr. Trump’s misdeeds and, perhaps most importantly, mirrored Republicans’ incendiary tactics.
“I think it’s clear that we outsmarted them, which is why they’re now coming out and admitting that they’re not going to impeach Joe Biden,” Mr. Moskowitz said.
They did so under the leadership of Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, his No. 2.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said it was paramount to counter any Republican narrative before it took hold. She saw Republicans building momentum for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas and wanted to prevent a similar case against Mr. Biden from developing in the Oversight Committee.
“A lot of what we do is setting the plays and figuring out the strategy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “Which questions and topics might be most appropriate for which members? How do we want to build a crescendo and tell a story over the course of a hearing? How can we work with some of our freshman members to help them develop their own ideas?”
In another era, newcomers like Ms. Crockett would have been unlikely to appear on executives’ radars. But there is a new model on Capitol Hill, inspired in part by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez herself, who in 2018, at age 28, became the youngest woman elected to Congress.
She learned her oversight skills under Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who led the committee and died in 2019. When she had to choose between serving on the Financial Services Committee, where lawmakers can raise large campaign contributions from Wall Street, and overseeing work, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made a decision that previous New York lawmakers would have found unthinkable.
While the Oversight Committee is known as a site of partisan fighting and self-aggrandizement, Mr. Garcia said oversight was his “first choice.”
Mr. Garcia’s moment of social media fame — planned in advance, by his own admission — came during a January hearing in which he mocked Republicans’ impeachment efforts against Biden by making a famously dramatic and detailed takedown, almost verbatim an episode of the reality television show “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
The Democrats, Mr. Garcia said from his seat at the podium on Capitol Hill, “have receipts. Prove. A timeline. Screenshots. We have everything we need to conclusively prove that foreign governments funneled money through Trump properties and into Donald Trump’s pockets, all in violation of the Constitution.”
Mr. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with foreign governments. But the moment had its intended effect. The “Real Housewives” welcomed Mr. Garcia’s remarks and shared them widely on social media, and Bravo host Andy Cohen featured them on his popular nightly show “Watch What Happens Live.”
“We need to communicate to the public in a way that is understandable, and I think for me this moment has reached so many people who have not heard what is happening with the Oversight Committee,” said Mr. Garcia, the first openly gay immigrant elected to Congress, said in an interview. “It was effective because they understood it in a way that spoke to them.”
Mr. Goldman took a different approach. As the lead lawyer on the first impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump, Mr. Goldman knows the evidence on Ukraine and Hunter Biden better than most.
He has made it his mission to publicly push back against Republican efforts to twist facts to fit their allegations of wrongdoing by the president and his family members.
“I knew Republicans would make statements behind closed doors and then selectively leak portions of it to try to spread a false narrative. And that’s why I didn’t want to allow them to do that,” Mr. Goldman said.
It is clear that Mr. Comer has lost patience with the Democrats and their tactics.
He complained about the freshmen and said they intimidated his witnesses. He called Mr. Moskowitz a “Smurf” and made the newbie dress like one at the next hearing, wearing blue shoes and a Smurf tie.
“I have never seen witness intimidation like I did today,” Mr. Comer said on Newsmax in February, singling out Mr. Raskin, Mr. Goldman, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Crockett. “They wagged their fingers. They pointed, they shouted.”
At a recent hearing, Mr. Moskowitz insisted on calling for a vote on Mr. Biden’s impeachment, knowing full well that Republicans lacked the votes. Mr. Comer appeared upset and refused to support the motion. But even Rep. Jim Jordan, one of the top Republicans leading the impeachment campaign, smiled.
Ms. Crockett did not ask to serve on the Oversight Committee; She was looking for financial services or justice. But Rep. Katherine M. Clark, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, persuaded her to join, and it turned out to be a natural fit.
Ms. Crockett is no stranger to partisan fighting. She came from the Texas State House, where Republicans once issued a warrant for her arrest amid a dispute over Texas election laws. (The framed warrant now hangs in her Dallas office.)
Making sure she’s camera ready, she heads to a special makeup room in her office to prepare for her frequent television appearances.
She and other freshmen often found themselves at odds with Republican bomb-throwers, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. One of the first assignments Ms. Crockett and Mr. Garcia received was to tour the D.C. prison with Ms. Greene to counter her narrative that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were political prisoners who were held in inhumane conditions.
Then Ms. Crockett sat next to Ms. Greene at a congressional hearing as the Georgia congresswoman showed nude photos of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, engaging in sexual acts.
“It was one of those ‘we’re frozen’ moments. Like, what do we do?” Ms. Crockett recalled. “We all looked at each other and said: Did that just happen? We were all shocked and in awe.”
But Ms. Crockett is almost never at a loss for words. Her committee speeches repeatedly made headlines in left-leaning media.
“With all the viral moments and all the antics, people think, ‘Oh, she wanted that.’ Actually, I didn’t do that,” Ms. Crockett said of her role on the oversight committee. “But it definitely worked.”
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2024-05-12 18:54:22
www.nytimes.com
