GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz yells at the impeachment witnesses for mentioning Barron Trump

(Image credit: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

published 4 December 2019

Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-Fla.) five minutes of questioning are apparently for him to talk and for witnesses to listen.

On Wednesday, legal experts gathered before the House Judiciary Committee for an impeachment hearing, during which Gaetz didn't do much hearing at all. Instead, he used most of his questioning opportunity to bring up the witnesses' apparent liberal bias, and then devolved into a one-sided shouting match once they started to answer his question.

Gaetz first tried to trap Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman into adhering to an anti-impeachment article he wrote before President Trump's infamous phone call with Ukraine's president. "Until this call on July 25, I was an impeachment skeptic," Feldman snuck in before Gaetz pivoted to Stanford University Professor Pamela Karlan. Gaetz questioned Karlan on her donations to past Democratic candidates, and then accused her of having "contempt" for conservatives because on a podcast, she'd said "conservatives ... tend to spread out more, perhaps because they don't even want to be around themselves."

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But before she could clarify that statement, Gaetz unloaded on Karlan. "You may not see this from the ivory towers of your law school, but it makes actual people in this country..." Gaetz said before Karlan tried to respond. "Excuse me, you don't get to interrupt me on this time," Gaetz said over her, and brought up an earlier play on words Karlan made regarding Trump's 13-year-old son Barron. "When you invoke the president's son's name here ... that does not lend credibility to your argument. It makes you look mean," Gaetz went on. Watch the whole exchange below. Kathryn Krawczyk

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.