The first clue about the character of Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar came when all of his siblings recorded a commercial endorsing his Democratic opponent in the last election.
The stunning public endorsement underscored the family’s rancorous relationship with the conservative firebrand who has represented Arizona’s 4th Congressional District since 2011.
“It would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist,” sister Grace Gosar says in the ad.
“I think my brother has traded a lot of the values we had at our kitchen table,” sister Joan Gosar added.
Now Gosar is busy promoting a morbid conspiracy-theory-turned-meme involving billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August, and a subsequent autopsy ruled his death a suicide.
He was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges after reports of a sex ring involving underage girls.
During the impeachment hearings yesterday, Gosar sent out 23 tweets that, when combined, spelled out “EPSTEIN DIDNT KILL HIMSELF.”
Talk about not having much to do.
The circumstances of Epstein’s death immediately sparked controversy, including a litany of conspiracy theories that he was murdered.
Epstein’s connections with powerful figures, from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to Prince Andrew, fed the ballooning speculations.
Trump has contributed to the conspiratorial speculation, telling reporters in August he has “no idea” whether Clinton was involved in Epstein’s death.
It wasn’t long before Twitter observers pointed out Gosar’s tweets, which were posted over the course of several hours.
Gosar responded to those reactions with another tweet last night in which the first letter of each line added up to “AREA 51.”
Maybe the wackiness was to be expected after we watched Gosar, during a congressional hearing in February, invoke a taunt that you’d more expect to hear on a playground than during a Congressional hearing.
‘Liar, liar, pants on fire,’” Gosar said to former Trump fixer and attorney Michael Cohen.
Next to Gosar was a poster of Cohen emblazoned with slogan.
Perfect, if you’re in an SNL skit, not Congress. (SNL did mock Gosar that weekend)
Kyle Mooney as Arizona’s Paul Goser on SNL.
Gosar has been a loyal ally of Trump, and his tweets voiced his support for the president in the face of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
And he’s been a wacky controversial figure for years.
In October 2017, Gosar suggested that the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was planned by “an Obama sympathizer” and that liberal activist George Soros may have been a Nazi collaborator as a youth.
Both suggestions were lies.
Before Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2018, Gosar called for the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants who were attending the speech at the invitation of Democratic members of Congress, including from Arizona.
Before that, Gosar outlined his views on “dreamers,” young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children, in an interview with Frank Gaffney, an anti-Muslim activist who has peddled his own widely discredited conspiracies.
Earlier this year, he was part of a documentary showing the efforts of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to corral support among far-right European political figures as part of a trip ostensibly about better understanding free speech issues.
On the same trip, Gosar spoke in London in support of a British man banned from social media for espousing what was deemed hate speech and who was jailed for repeatedly violating court-ordered privacy during a criminal trial.
Gosar, who grew up in western Wyoming, represents the 4th Congressional District, the state’s most Republican-leaning.
It spans northwest Arizona, from the Nevada border down past Lake Havasu City along the Colorado River to Yuma, and sweeps across the rural outskirts of the East Valley.
It is a district that once was represented by Bob Stump, a well respected and admired Democrat-turned-Republican who never made national headlines as a fool.