Crockett: White House’s Messaging on Shutdown Is ‘A Lot More Illegal’

Collins: “As you know, it’s very quiet here on Capitol Hill tonight. What we’ve seen, though, from the White House is not silence. They’re actually, you know, using all of their government websites to say, this is Democrats pushing this shutdown. I think we have a — we can show you some of those websites showing these messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown. HUD, DoJ, State Department, Agriculture. Do you think that they’re being more effective in their messaging in terms of putting this blame on Democrats?”
Crockett: “I think they’re being a lot more illegal in their messaging. The first thing that I wanted to know was, how can this not be a violation of the Hatch Act in some way? Right? Because we are not allowed to politic on official sites, period. Right? And that’s what they’re doing. They literally change official government websites to put out their propaganda. Instead of just saying, we’re currently in a shutdown, you decided to play partisan politics on an official website, and I guess there is no limit to what they won’t do because they do the exact same thing when we walk into committee. Instead of us having real committee hearings where we are actually able to get information that may somehow help the American people understand what’s going on, instead, it’s always a campaign rally that they’re doing when we walk into committee, and it’s more spewing of their propaganda. So I don’t think that they’re being more effective. I think that they are being more illegal in the ways that they’re going about making sure that they can push out the information. I think that the American people are smart. You know, as I was sitting here waiting to come on, I was going through my email, and almost at the top of my email was an email from a federal worker, a federal worker that said, ‘Keep up the great work. We will be okay. This is too important.’ So even in this moment, we are getting emails, or at least I am, from federal workers that understand the sacrifice that is happening right now. But this idea that, you know, the retribution is going to be that since the government is shut down, then we’re going to call in his henchman, Russell Vought, so that he can go and do what he’s been doing, but he’s been doing that with no permission. We’ve had to go to court I don’t know how many times to say, ‘No, you are wrong. You can’t fire those people.’ So what difference does it make? They have consistently violated the law, whether it was the statute or whether it was the Constitution.”