When Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) arrived at the Hunter Biden contempt hearing two weeks ago, he came prepared.
Moskowitz didn’t know the president’s beleaguered son would show up to the committee room, but he guessed correctly that Republicans might attack Biden for the naked photographs recovered on the First Son’s laptop.
So just in case, Moskowitz printed his own ammo: an enlarged photo of former President Donald Trump with his arm around infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He defied his skeptical staff, who rolled their eyes at the photo, suggesting it violated customs of hearing decorum, and brought it anyway.
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As Moskowitz predicted, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) whipped out the nude photos of Hunter Biden at the January hearing. So Moskowitz clapped back, displaying his Trump-Epstein poster, gleefully reminding the committee of Trump’s ties to Epstein.
“You come up here and talk about Hunter Biden’s behavior, and you’re so disgusted, but the guy that you all kneel to associates himself with a pedophile,” Moskowitz said at the hearing.
The moment caught fire, making the rounds on social media and in news coverage of the hearing. It was just one of several outrageous moments in the committee room that day. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) launched into Biden for not having the “balls” to face the committee in a closed-door deposition, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) got the phrase “dick pics” entered into the congressional record for the second time.
But Moskowitz doesn’t care about adding to the chaos. It’s the Democrats’ job, he told The Daily Beast, to give the committee’s Republican majority a “taste of their own medicine.”
“They’ve decided to turn it into Cirque Du Soleil Oversight where literally, it’s just a total show. If that is the game that they are going to play, then game on,” Moskowitz told The Daily Beast.
The Oversight Committee has been the nexus for partisan sparring this entire congressional term. Staring down the 2024 presidential election, Republicans have furiously investigated President Joe Biden, desperate to uncover any connections to his son’s shady business dealings. So far, they’ve turned up hardly anything—let alone evidence of an impeachable offense. Instead, they’ve lashed out at their committee counterparts, spreading misinformation and attacking Democrats.
But the young, spunky cohort of Democrats—mentored by the leader of Trump’s second impeachment, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD)—are refusing to take it. Where past generations of Democrats might have sat back, preferring to let Republican dysfunction speak for itself, the Oversight Dems are hitting Republicans hard.
“We’re calling out their bullshit like every single time, and I think they’re surprised by it. I think they’re not used to it. And I think that we are causing them great embarrassment,” Garcia told The Daily Beast.
Chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the Oversight Committee is loaded with right-wing GOP firebrands like Reps. Greene, Mace, Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Jim Jordan (R-OH).
As freshman Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) put it, “The only wild one that isn’t on the committee is Matt Gaetz.”
While the panel may be stocked with Republicans accustomed to making news, the lack of actionable evidence of wrongdoing against Biden has started to turn Republicans against Comer.
“One would be hard pressed to find the best moment for James Comer in the Oversight Committee,” one House Republican lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Messenger in a piece published Wednesday. “It’s been a parade of embarrassments.”
According to Democrats on the committee who spoke to The Daily Beast, that “parade of embarrassments” has been no accident.
Hunter Biden, center, and his attorney Abbe Lowell, left, address the media after leaving the House Oversight and Accountability Committee markup.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesKnowing that he’d be going toe to toe against so many out-spoken, truth-averse MAGA darlings, Raskin recruited his own Avengers-like team he calls the “Truth Squad.”
“I was basically looking for extremely hardworking, detail-oriented members who know how to throw a punch in the media,” Raskin told The Daily Beast. “Because I knew exactly what we would be up against.”
Perhaps the most persistent of that squad have been the freshmen Democrats. In addition to Moskowitz, Crockett, and Garcia, Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Maxwell Frost (D-FL), Greg Casar (D-TX) and Summer Lee (D-PA) have all torn into Republican rhetoric, exposing their puffery as political theater. Those congressional newbies have been buttressed by relative veterans like Katie Porter (D-CA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Raskin—a former constitutional law professor—acts as equal parts coach and teacher for the new class of Democrats, workshopping their arguments, crafting overarching messaging, while also letting members fly on their own. In an interview with The Daily Beast, he gushed about his team, sounding like a proud parent as he rattled off crowning moments on the committee.
“There’s just great teamwork, and a lot of friendship and camaraderie among the members,” Raskin said.
Moskowitz has relished getting under the skin of his GOP colleagues, deploying tactics he picked up during his two years working with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as his emergency management czar. He has particularly relished his role as a gadfly to Comer, highlighting the chairman’s own sketchy business background—citing a report by The Daily Beast—and luring him into using rhetoric better fit for an elementary school playground. (Comer called Moskowitz a “smurf.”)
“You’re talking about the chairman of the committee and the most junior Democrat in the minority, who end up squaring off on an almost daily basis,” Raskin said. “And Moskowitz is absolutely undeterred.”
Moskowitz and the rest of the Democrats’ approach has worked. They’ve made a public mockery of the GOP’s impeachment efforts, and, as reported Wednesday by The Messenger, even House Republicans acknowledge the “unfocused” investigation isn’t scoring political points.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) left, and Dan Goldman (D-NY), raise their hands to indicate they want to hear testimony from Hunter Biden.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty ImagesGoldman, the lead counsel in the first Trump impeachment, has also been a rising star on the committee. He’s struck a more serious, prosecutorial tone, and is intimately familiar with Trump’s own foreign dealings with Ukraine. He’s been prepared to tear apart the GOP investigation, but Republicans, Goldman said, have made that easier than expected.
“I frankly didn’t think that their investigations would turn up so little, and would continue for so long with no facts to support their allegations,” Goldman told The Daily Beast.
Moskowitz, Goldman, and Crockett are all attorneys, experienced in thinking on their feet and catering to an audience—only this time their audience isn’t a judge and jury; it’s the American people.
“We’re there to make sure that the American people understand that number one, we’re fighting. And number two, we know what the hell we’re doing,” Crockett said.
The Oversight Democrats have never lost sight of that audience. As Raskin battled lymphoma in March last year, he sent Crockett and Garcia to tour the D.C. jail holding Jan. 6 defendants. Raskin said he picked Crockett—a former public defender—specifically to push back on Republican assertions that the defendants were mistreated political prisoners.
After the tour, Crockett told reporters that, “as far as I’m concerned, this absolutely passed with flying colors.”
Moskowitz has relentlessly pressed Comer for trying to hold Hunter Biden in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena. Meanwhile Republicans on the committee, like Jordan and Perry, have blatantly flouted their own subpoenas. Moskowitz brought a stack of those subpoenas and read through them, calling out the House GOP’s biggest players one by one.
“I often think to myself, are we this good or are they that bad?” Moskowitz told The Daily Beast.
Crockett, in particular, has become a darling of the left. A clip of Crockett holding up a photo of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom from a September Oversight hearing went viral—raking in millions of views.
“These are our national secrets, looks like, in the shitter to me,” Crockett said, deadpan, in the hearing.
Crockett told The Daily Beast that the moment was organic. Enraged by Republicans hammering the so-called “Biden crime family,” Crockett threw out her prepared remarks and texted her legislative director to “print out a picture of those documents.”
“That was one of those moments where I was so pissed, and I think that they were just going on about the crime family and all this bullshit crime that they saw somehow, but they couldn't see the crime that was sitting in front of them,” Crockett said. “I was mad.”
Crockett knew Fox News was streaming the hearing and she anticipated getting negative attention from right-wing media. But she didn’t expect to go viral. Garcia, the former mayor of Long Beach and president of this Congress’s freshman class, has also courted that spotlight more intentionally.
Specifically, Garcia manufactured a viral moment by quoting real housewife of Salt Lake City Heather Gay’s monologue from this season’s finale. (To prove that foreign governments have funneled money into Trump’s pockets, Garcia said Democrats had, “Receipts. Proof. A timeline. Screenshots.”)
“I’m gay. I watch Bravo. I like RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Garcia said. “I know a lot about pop culture. And so I try to incorporate that into my work and committees, and I do it because we have to reach everybody.”
Garcia continued that Democrats couldn’t just reach people who are reading “The New York Times and watching cable TV.”
“We’ve got to reach folks in the broader country, and pop culture is a way of doing that. And so I try to bring that out whenever I can,” he said.
Quoting a housewife had its intended effect. Bravo’s Andy Cohen ran the clip of Garcia during his popular talk show “Watch What Happens Live.” So did The Hollywood Reporter.
As they invoke the Real Housewives, use colorful language, and generally stick it to Republicans on the committee, it almost seems like the Oversight Democrats are having fun. Moskowitz gets asked if he’s enjoying himself on the committee all the time.
While Congress shouldn’t be fun, Moskowitz said, “It’s fun when the members from that committee come up to me after the hearing and say, ‘Boy, you really crushed.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you make it easy.’”
