Stay strong, Lauren Boebert
The White House dragged the Colorado congresswoman to the Situation Room today to pressure her to flip on the Epstein files. Will she crack?
During my Jezebel years, we all had “favorite” (derogatory) members of Congress that we’d want to claim writing the piece about when something related to that person came up. Mine was Rep. Lauren Boebert, the gun-loving racist from Colorado who became a grandmother at 36 and was caught giving a hand-job at a local musical theater production of Beetlejuice. I’m obsessed with how cartoonishly awful she is: She owned a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, called Shooters Grill, where the servers openly carried firearms; she once defended her sex pest husband, who exposed himself to a teenager in a bowling alley, by claiming the girl “begged” for it. Here’s just a sampling of stupid but true headlines I got to write about Lauren in the wake of her fondling debacle, so you can get a sense of my bird-brained fascination with this woman:
Lauren Boebert Says She Didn’t Take Birth Control Because It’s ‘Cheaper to Have a Kid’
Ex-Wrestler Takes 2nd DNA Test to Confirm He’s Not Lauren Boebert’s Father
Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls Lauren Boebert a ‘Nasty Little Bitch’
I hadn’t heard about much Lauren recently, aside from this past Halloween, when she and her boyfriend dressed up as a Mexican woman and an ICE agent in what ABC News described as a “racially charged costume” that “sparked backlash.” (She finally divorced the sex pest husband.) So you can imagine my delight when Boebert was thrust to the forefront of the national conversation today once again……because the president of the United States is literally begging her, as an emergency last resort, to save his ass from a forced vote on the release of the Epstein files.
Backing up a bit, one under-covered aspect of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history was House Speaker Mike Johnson refusing for seven weeks to swear in Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D), who won a special election in September to replace her late father, and who would be the 218th and final signature on a discharge petition that would force a House vote demanding release of the Epstein files. Senate Democrats finally caved this week and made a horrible deal with Republicans to reopen the government, which basically gave them nothing besides some “promised” future vote on health care subsidies—and, of course, their 218th vote on that petition.
Today, in a strategy/timing decision I don’t entirely understand—perhaps to distract from the horrific press the party is getting from the Senate shutdown cave?—House Oversight Democrats decided to release a trove of new damning emails they’d subpeonaed from Epstein’s estate, which do look quite bad for Trump. These emails include:
Epstein telling author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls” in a 2019 email
Epstein writing, “I know how dirty donald is,” in a 2018 email about Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen agreeing to cooperate in a federal investigation of Trump
Epstein writing to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump.”
Epstein writing that one redacted child victim of his “spent hours at my house with” Trump
Now, does any of this really tell us anything new about Trump’s involvement with Epstein? No; we saw the birthday card, and we saw Trump move Ghislaine Maxwell into a luxury spa prison in exchange for her saying he didn’t molest girls. But does it drive Trump insane that we are talking about Epstein again after he has tried so desperately to shut the topic down and frame it as a hoax? Yes. And so the White House went into panic mode today trying to stop the Democrats from passing their discharge petition tomorrow, now that Grijalva has finally been sworn in. And that effort zeroed in on two Republican congresswomen whose names are on the petition: Boebert and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. Trump called Boebert personally, and the White House summoned her to the Situation Room to meet with “top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials,” including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, according to the New York Times.
Hilariously, Boebert is already an unhinged conspiracy theorist, and when you invite someone like her to the Situation Room to demand that she help cover up for a literal ring of billionaire pedophiles, it only makes her paranoid ass want to report the incident to QAnon himself. Even a broken clock is right twice a day:
Mace, an equally batshit congresswoman who once put her wrist in a sling to try to convince the world that a “pro-trans man” injured her by shaking her hand, has also reportedly ignored the White House’s attempts to convert her. So it appears Democrats do have the votes, with the help of these Republicans:
To be clear, this does not mean that the files are going to be released. Even if the Senate voted yes on releasing them and Trump declined to veto, there is no chance in hell that Trump’s DOJ hasn’t already redacted the hell out of those files or disappeared them to the extent that nothing too damning about Trump would ever come out. I believe Trump is desperate to block this discharge petition because he doesn’t want Republicans in the Senate to be forced to vote on record about whether to cover up the Epstein files, and he doesn’t want this conversation dragged on or legitimized any further. This discharge petition further backs him into a corner and removes his control of the whole narrative, and we know that a narcissist backed into a corner will behave in increasing alarming ways.
I also think it’s important to see the forest for the trees here: The question is not whether or not there’s some kind of smoking gun in the Epstein files that can “end” Trump right now, or how any of this plays out electorally. The moral rot at the center of the White House, the justice system, and Congress is being exposed more and more clearly every day as this drags on. We are talking about pedophilia and sex trafficking being perpetrated, or at the very least least enabled, by the most powerful people in the country, and representatives we elected bending over backwards to cover it up.
It’s a great time to start paying attention to who exactly is calling for justice and transparency in this moment, who is really quiet, and who is telling you to shut up and look the other way. Because when a party is so grotesquely decayed that it finds itself on the wrong side of Lauren Boebert, ethically speaking, it suggests a level of corruption and complicity that is far deeper than anyone realizes.