A day after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin engaged in a tense and fiery exchange with House Financial Services Committee chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Fox News hosts Pete Hegseth and Katie Pavlich wholeheartedly backed the Trump cabinet official and called for a law limiting the length of congressional hearings.
During a Monday committee hearing in which he was grilled over Democrats’ demand for President Trump’s tax returns, Mnuchin bickered with Waters over time constraints, claiming he needed to leave for an appointment with a Bahrain official.
The pair went back and forth over whether he’d stay or leave to attend his “important meeting,” resulting in the two arguing about how Waters should conduct her own hearing.
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On Tuesday, Fox News daytime chat show Outnumbered covered the kerfuffle, with liberal Fox News contributor Marie Harf first saying she felt “uncomfortable” with how Mnuchin showed “disdain for congressional oversight,” prompting her colleague Dagen McDowell to burst out laughing.
“I think he’s a rich dude who shows disdain for everybody, quite frankly,” she chuckled.
Harf went on to say that congressional oversight is “how the system works,” causing Hegseth, the show’s “One Lucky Guy” panelist, to complain about Democrats demanding six years of Trump’s tax returns.
Such a demand “isn’t oversight,” he said, “this is harassment.” Harf, however, explained that there is a statute allowing the House Ways and Means Committee to request the tax returns of any American.
Pavlich, meanwhile, chimed in to claim it cannot be done for “vicious political reasons” before offering up a new law of her own. “I think they should make a law that congressional hearings should be no longer than three hours anyway,” she declared. “Because they’re too long.”
“Yeah!” Hegseth exclaimed. “He set a meeting for five o’clock, he wanted to keep that meeting, and they wanted to keep harassing him.”
Co-host Melissa Francis, meanwhile, looked directly into the camera and laughed as the Fox & Friends Weekend host gave his full-throated defense of Mnuchin’s behavior.
