11-4-2022
Jim Jordan’s 1,050-page report receives brutal Washington Post fact-check.
If Republicans win the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan is expected to chair the Judiciary Committee.
But he may have lost further credibility with the
press corps after a pre-election stunt received a brutal fact-check by The Washington Post.
The fact check came after Jordan and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a 1,050-page tome alleging_ politicization of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Writing in The Post, Philip Bump analyzed the
"big-stack-of-paper strategy" employed by Jordan.
"News broke early Friday: The Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a
'1,000 Page Report' on alleged politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department.
The length was mentioned in the group’s tweet and in its press release, reinforcing the heft that 1,000 pages of documentation would obviously convey," he wrote. "There’s just one problem with this assertion:
The report itself was less than 50 pages."
He reported over 600 pages were nothing but letters and over 300 pages were just signatures at the bottom of letters.
"In fact, there were more than 1,000 pages of material that wasn’t the report itself, instead mostly those letters," he wrote,
noting the report itself was only 43-pages.
The team at the newspaper did a graphic representation showing how little of the report
had substance.
"One final bit of data. If we pick a name at random — say, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) — we can tally that his signature appears on 173 pages alongside his colleagues.
In other words, there are four times as many pages with Chip Roy’s signature as there are actual pages in the report," he wrote.
"Not quite the hefty bombshell the committee’s allies are suggesting."