Fox News host Dana Perino has saluted Hillary Clinton for standing her ground against MAGA lawmakers who disrupted her deposition with wild antics.
“I don’t blame her for getting mad,” the Republican commentator, 53, said on The Five on Tuesday.
Clinton, 78, shut down MAGA Rep. Lauren Boebert during her closed-door deposition after learning that the Colorado congresswoman had violated the rules by leaking a photo of her to MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson.
“I’m done with this. If you guys are doing that, I’m done,” Clinton snapped, raising her hands. “You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home.”
Perino argued that Boebert, 39, had no one to blame but herself for Clinton’s scathing clapback.
“If you leak a photo to social media because that’s more important to you than adhering to the rules, then, yeah, you’re gonna get slapped down like that,” said Perino, who served as President George W. Bush’s White House press secretary.
Perino noted that Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had requested for their testimony—part of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—to take place in public, and that Republicans had refused.
She also said the MAGA lawmakers came up short on all the hype they had built around the hearing and called on them to focus.
“The Clintons asked for a public hearing and they were denied a public hearing because they wanted to do it behind closed doors because they were gonna get all of this great information out of it,” Perino said. “Well, now we know—you can look at the tape, is there great information that came out of it?”
The Fox News host called on the MAGA lawmakers to move past their fixation on Clinton, adding to a swelling chorus of right-wing figures who have slammed the decision to depose the former secretary of state and first lady, who is not named in the Epstein files, is accused of no wrongdoing, and claims never to have met the pedophile.
“I think that for the Republicans, I would say: There’s a lot of problems in this country, pick your battles. This isn’t one of them,” she said.
Clinton stormed out of the hearing after Boebert leaked the photo, but later returned, only for the MAGA congresswoman to ask her about the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Boebert’s office for comment.
