Representative Jamaal Bowman was furious to hear a reporter still inquiring about his infamous fire alarm incident, which led to him being given a plea deal to dismiss a misdemeanor charge and pay a $1,000 fine, plus write an apology letter to the Capitol Police.
After “insurrectionist” Bowman was caught on security footage pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in September in an attempt to delay a House vote, he embarrassingly claimed in his defense that he didn’t know how fire alarms work and that he thought the “alarm would open the door.”
Following his guilty plea, a full video of the incident was released, showing Bowman removing warning signs about an alarm going off if doors are opened, and then pulling a fire alarm adjacent to the door. That raises the obvious question of why the full video wasn’t available to the public before the plea deal was offered, and can only lead one to speculate that it was to try to limit the amount of outrage the slap-on-the-wrist plea deal would generate.
His story never added up, and when one reporter tried to ask him about it this week, he opted not to add his mountain of lies and try to deflect before fleeing questions.
“Mr. Bowman, why did you plead guilty to knowingly pulling that fire alarm, when you said you didn’t know it?” Bowman was asked by CNN’s Manu Raju. “You initially told us that you didn’t know it was a fire alarm.”
“Why are you still talking about this man?” Bowman fired back, appearing just as stunned as the rest of us that he was asked a real question by a CNN reporter. “That’s behind me, that’s been adjudicated, that’s done, paid the fine, moved forward — and in three months it’ll be dismissed.”
“But you weren’t straight about what happened initially,” Raju replied.
“I was very straight. I was straight from the very beginning,” he repeated.
“But you said you didn’t know?” Raju asked.
“I was straight from the beginning,” Bowman repeated again before asking other reporters if they had any questions about “anything else,” then interrupting Raju once more and fleeing the scene.
Watch below:
