Rep. Lauren Boebert left a group of Jewish visitors to the Capitol bewildered Thursday morning when she asked them if they were doing “reconnaissance” after seeing them at an elevator at the Capitol.
Members of the group, which was meeting with Rep. Tom Suozzi, were wearing yarmulkes, and the person coordinating the group is Orthodox, with a traditional beard.
One witness said the group, along with other members of Congress, was waiting for an elevator. When the doors opened, Boebert stepped out of the elevator and looked the group of visitors “from head to toe,” the witness said. Boebert then asked if they were there to conduct “reconnaissance.”
“When I heard that, I actually turned to the person standing next to me and asked, ‘Did you just hear that?’” a rabbi who was with the group told BuzzFeed News.
“You know, I’m not sure to be offended or not,” the rabbi said. “I was very confused.” The rabbi added that “people are very sensitive” now, especially after what happened in Texas this past weekend, when an armed man held four people hostage at a synagogue.
Boebert told BuzzFeed News that she was referencing the many comments that have been directed at her from Democrats about Capitol tours prior to the Jan. 6 attack, adding that some people present “got it.”
“I saw a large group and made a joke. Sadly when Democrats see the same they demonize my family for a year straight,” she said in a text.
“I’m too short to see anyone’s yarmulkes,” she added.
So she’s saying that she made an extremely obscure joke about people doing reconnaissance in the Capitol to a group of total strangers as if they should know what she was talking about?
Ok, if that’s what she says. But I would not be surprised if she thought she was looking at a group of Muslims and she was making one of those “Ilhan Omar with a backpack in the elevator” jokes she is so fond of. She is very, very stupid. Extremely stupid. I honestly doubt she knows what a yarmulke is.