Matt Gaetz, CALL YOUR LAWYER! Or call your mother so she can ground you and take away your phone. Or maybe call a plumber to caulk your stupid mouth shut, for the love of God.

In just minutes, the entire internet will glue its collective finger to the refresh key for Evan's liveblog of Michael Cohen's testimony to the House Oversight Committee. On the eve of that testimony, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz tweeted this at the witness:

Hey @MichaelCohen212 - Do your wife and father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot...

Wow! That sounds a lot like witness intimidation. Only to prove it, you'd have to prove intent to intimidate, and a congressman who went to IRL law school would nev---

REPORTER: Congressman, does your tweet amount to witness tampering?

GAETZ: Absolutely not. It's witness testing. When people come before the Congress with an intent to perpetuate their continuous lies, we have an opportunity and I would say an obligation to test who those people lie to.

Oh, JFC! "Witness testing" is not a thing. But thanks, Congressman, for making sure to explicitly connect your statement with Mr. Cohen's upcoming testimony. You could easily have mumbled something about the Speech or Debate Clause and wandered off. It would have been total bullshit, since, among other reasons, you tweeted from your personal Florida Man account, not the official Crazyass Florida Voters one.

But instead you offered up a threat to expose embarrassing secrets about a congressional witness if he appears before the House, even answering the phone when a reporter from the The Daily Beast called to ask if you had lost your damn mind, ALLEGEDLY:

"No," he stressed, "it is challenging the veracity and character of a witness. We do it everyday. We typically do it during people's testimony."

"This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas," he added.

We'll say this for Matt Gaetz, he does give good quote! But in fact he was not questioning Cohen's veracity. If he'd said, "Michael Cohen is a damn, dirty liar, and you can't believe a word he says!" that would have been questioning the witness's character. Threatening to out him for adulterous affairs so that his wife cheats on him while he's in jail is NOT forcing him to "compete in the marketplace of ideas," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. It's blackmail.

Which someone clearly pointed out to Congressman Florida Man, since he immediately dragged his big head into the well of the House to defend his God-given right to threaten to expose a philanderer if he comes before Congress to testify about paying hush money to the porn star who had unprotected sex with Donald Trump while his third wife was home with their newborn son.

Rep. Matt Gaetz Repeats Cohen Threat on House Floor: ‘Does He Lie to His Own Family?’www.youtube.com

Good job, Matty! This time you remembered to call the guy a liar and insist that, somehow, Cohen's infidelity is relevant to his character in a way that Donald Trump's is not. Your law professors at William and Mary are ... still horrified, we're guessing. But at least you managed to talk your smack on the House floor, so, YOU'RE DOING GREAT SWEETIE!

To which Speaker Pelosi retorted, SON, YOUR RABBI HAS LEFT THE BUILDING.

New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell stands ready to make a referral to the newly resuscitated House Ethics Committee, while Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler can't be bothered "to waste time responding to every stupid thing that Matt Gaetz says." Which is a fair point -- there are only so many hours in the day, and no one has time to be mopping up Gaetz's chronic verbal diarrhea.

So it fell to young Matt to mop up his own shit.

Good luck getting that toothpaste back in the tube, big fella! But where might a hard drinkin' congressman from Florida have come by this intel on Michael Cohen's personal life? And why is he bringing up the guy's father-in-law?

Yeah, that was a rhetorical question. Donald Trump has been explicitly lobbying the Justice Department to go after Cohen's family for months, and clearly he's drafted Rep. Quietparts Loud to the cause. So today when Michael Cohen shows up with canceled checks showing that Donald Trump reimbursed him in 2017 for the Stormy Daniels payoff, Matt Gaetz will respond by shouting "PENIS PENIS PENIS! FATHER-IN-LAW!"

Only, actually he won't. Because this dipshit went out there and threatened Cohen, and he doesn't even sit on the House Oversight Committee. So Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows will undoubtedly try to pants Cohen by asking about his personal life, but Matty G won't get to say a damn thing. So, big Mazal Tov to the Congressman on finally finding a way to shut the hell up!

THESE PEOPLE ARE SO GODDAMN STUPID, IT'S EXHAUSTING.

[Daily Beast]

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