EXCLUSIVE: Speaker Mike Johnson's offices were open while Hakeem Jeffries's was closed during government shutdown
One party leader appears to take government shutdowns more seriously than the other.
Just hours into the Schumer Shutdown, the Washington Reporter exclusively reported that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’s (D., N.Y.) office was closed — and the pushback on behalf of the top House Democrat was bizarre.
No one denied that Jeffries’s office was unstaffed in the morning. The pushback came in part from the Capitol Hill press corps, which seemed to suggest that Jeffries’s personal office staff are entirely unessential workers.
“This is Jeffries personal office [sic],” Bloomberg’s Erik Wasson tweeted about the Reporter’s coverage. “He works out of leadership suite in the Capitol.”
That pushback doesn’t exactly make sense. “This is an insane tweet,” a House staffer texted the Reporter. “Even Jeffries’s staff would blush at this. His personal staff doesn’t show up on time so that’s okay?”
In contrast, Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) had both his personal office and his leadership office staffed no later than 9am on the first day of the Schumer Shutdown, the Reporter can exclusively confirm.
One source who visited Johnson’s personal office following Wasson’s post sent a photo to the Reporter: “Confirmed open — no newspapers piled up either.”
The Reporter independently confirmed that Johnson’s leadership office was open before 9am on the first day of the government shutdown, and that unlike Jeffries, his district office was open and staffed by 9am.