Rep. Bowman has just issued a statement regarding his pulling a fire alarm switch to delay yesterday’s vote in the House on the stop-gap funding bill:

This was obviously composed with the assistance of Bowman’s legal staff and PR flacks. Of course they insisted on the now obligatory Bill Clinton mantra of “I’m working hard every day blah blah blah” because it worked so well for Bill. The criminal statute that has been used to jail the January 6 rioters requires intent, so Bowman has to claim that deliberately pulling down a red switch in an alarm that hasn’t changed in design since he was a child was an accident. This is even worse than the “I didn’t know the gun was loaded!” excuse. Sometimes guns aren’t loaded. Fire alarms always go off when one pulls the lever. Bowman’s tale is more like a killer who stabbed someone to death swearing that he didn’t know a knife was loaded. It is also a classic, “I’m not a criminal, I’m a moron!” defense.

Neither criminals nor morons should be members of Congress. Nor should liars with contempt for the American public.

As always, it’s going to be mordantly amusing to see how the Democratic propagandists in the media try to spin this. Here was a preview: yesterday, as an afterthought to her ranting about the Republicans and the threatened shutdown, MSNBC hack Yasmin Vossoughian said, “Last thing I wanna mention and then we’re going to take a quick break, there was a mention of Jamaal Bowman, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, and the pulling of some sort of fire alarm.”

“Some sort of fire alarm.” The photo of Bowman pulling the alarm was already out; MSNBC, being without integrity, decided to make the incident seem like he had accidentally set off some arcane alarm by accident, not sure what the strange thing was. This was designed to be consistent with his office’s initial risible claim that “Congressman Bowman did not realize he would trigger a building alarm” when he manually pulled down the handle on a generic fore alarm.