Chelsea Clinton on Thursday took a tongue-in-cheek poke at a Republican lawmaker who posted old video on Christmas night showing a falling lighting fixture nearly braining her mother Hillary during a 1992 TV interview.
“At 11am on Christmas Eve, we were making cookies for Santa. Thank you Congressman @RepGosar for reminding me of my dad’s quick reflexes!” the former first daughter tweeted at Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona.
Gosar — a five-term conservative whose own siblings opposed his reelection in 2018 — tweeted the four-second clip that shows Bill and Hillary seated on a couch on the set of “60 Minutes.”
Host Steve Kroft was asking about Bubba’s philandering during the sitdown, which took place before the Super Bowl, when a heavy light fixture that had been attached to the wall fell off right above Hillary’s head.
The visibly frightened first lady darted from the couch as her husband sprang up, grabbed her and pulled her to safety.
“Remember the reason for the season! #MerryChristmas,” Gosar wrote in a post that included the video, which was widely panned on Twitter — but also garnered more than 11,000 “likes.”
Minutes earlier during the show, Hillary had delivered a line in defense of their marriage that later came back to haunt her.
“You know, I’m not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him,” Hillary had said, sparking a bipartisan backlash.
Kroft later recounted the incident in an interview with host Lesley Stahl for the show when he retired in September.
“It is said that this interview saved his presidential campaign, but it also almost killed them,” Stahl said.
“Oh right, with the light falling down? A wall-mounted lamp, a high-powered– a television lamp. It just sprung off the wall. It sounded like an explosion. I didn’t know what had happened,” he recounted before Stalh asked him what Hillary said after the near-miss, which never made it on the show.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Kroft quoted her as saying.
Gosar, 61, has a history of extremist views, including his assertion that the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 had been “created by the left” — a view also espoused by right-wing nutjob Alex jones — and that organizer Jason Kessler had been backed by George Soros, who he described as having “turned in his own people to the Nazis.” Soros was 14 at the end of World War II.
In September 2018, six of Gosar’s nine brothers and sisters endorsed his Democratic opponent in the midterms, saying they were alarmed by his extremist views on immigration, healthcare and white supremacy.
