On last night’s episode of Sean Hannity’s TV show, Hannity and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) went ahead and agreed with Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) that the BP escrow account is a “shakedown.” And amusingly, they failed to even mention that Barton was subjected to widespread media ridicule and then ordered by the GOP leadership to retract his comments just hours after he dramatically apologized to BP.
“We had this show on Capitol Hill today. And Joe Barton, congressman, said you know what, this is a shakedown,” said Hannity. “We have a lot of other Congressmen, you know, debating whether or not the White House is exceeding their constitutional authority by demanding that BP put all this money in escrow, when in fact we have a law in place.”
Gingrich agreed with Hannity in criticizing the Obama administration’s involvement with the escrow account — saying that BP would have done it anyway and now Obama is claiming credit for it, but also that there are serious problems if Obama was influential in the matter.
“But I just think the idea that if the president is directly engaged in extorting money from a company, this is like General Motors and Chrysler, where the administration basically stole money from the creditors who own stock and who had bonds, to give that money to their union allies,” said Gingrich. And what it’s gonna — what it says to the world is, be very careful about investing in the United States, because the political class may take the money away from you if the trial lawyers don’t get it first.”
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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