Alex Wagner Asks AOC If Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar Would Help ‘Get Hakeem Jeffries Elected Speaker of the House’

MSNBC host Alex Wagner asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) if she believes her conversations with Republicans on the House floor Tuesday might lead them to vote for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as speaker.

Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Both voted against Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become House speaker. It was later reported during the conversations Ocasio-Cortez informed them Democrats had not cut any deals with McCarthy to help him get elected.

On Alex Wagner Tonight, the host interviewed the New York Democrat during her first day as a member of the minority party.

Wagner said the conversations with her Republican colleagues “did not go unnoticed.”

“Can you enlighten us at all as to what those conversations were like?” Wagner asked. “And is there any hope that you guys work together to get Hakeem Jeffries elected as speaker of the House?

Ocasio-Cortez laughed during her response:

I think in chaos anything is possible, especially in this era. It is unlikely, but there is always a possibility. I do think that in terms of some of those conversations–listen, some of us in the House of Representatives are independent in certain ways from our party. And I do believe that in some of those conversations, there are things that are happening on the floor, these machinations are happening on the floor.

And sometimes the leadership of your party – in this case, the Republican Party – would be making claims in order to try to twist arms and get people in line. And a lot of times, information and truth are currency. And so, sometimes, to be able to fact-check some of the claims that McCarthy is making, whether Democrats are going to defect or not.

Ocasio-Cortez said Gosar and Gaetz spoke to her to keep their party’s leadership “honest.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

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