CNN’s Toobin, Phillip: Hawley’s Trying to Appeal to QAnon with Jackson Questioning

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin and CNN Senior Political Correspondent Abby Phillip argued that Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was an attempt to appeal to QAnon followers.

Toobin said, “You have a judge here who’s been on the bench for ten years almost, and we had the entire half-hour of Sen. Hawley’s question about a single case where he got to recite the grisly details of, and say pedophilia over and over again. This is about appealing to the QAnon audience, this cult that is a big presence in Republican Party politics now, that is, where — Sen. Hawley is trying to ingratiate himself with that group and run for president with their support. This has very little to do with Judge Jackson, who, as has come out throughout the hearing today, is one of many judges who have found the sentencing guidelines in these child porn possession cases excessive. But I mean, that was really an extraordinary half-hour, all about a single case.”

Phillip stated, “I think, first of all, Jeffrey is absolutely right that this is definitely a dog whistle to the kind of QAnon right. And the substance of the argument, as has been explained many times, [doesn’t] really check out. But, interesting to me, that this — she’s addressed this now by this point in the day multiple times, and it’s been actually an opportunity for her to explain an element of her resume that makes her actually quite unusual. She has been a trial court judge and has had to be in a position to make some of these very tough decisions, and that is actually a qualification that, even among the justices currently on the Supreme Court, she would be only in the company of Sonia Sotomayor in that respect. … And, in fact, in all of the questioning that came before it, she had a lot of opportunities to talk about some other cases that Sen. Hawley didn’t mention in which she did follow, for example, the prosecutor’s guidelines, and in other cases as well.”

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