Maxine Waters hasn’t accused the Russians of sabotaging her appearance on MSNBC last night — yet.
The California congresswoman was on Rachel Maddow’s show to talk — what else — about Donald Trump and what she thinks are scandals surrounding his presidency when it went off the rails quickly.
Maddow went to Waters, saying, “Chairwoman Waters, thank you so much for being here tonight, it’s really nice to have you here.”
Waters’ face suddenly dropped, and said, “She’s cutting out.”
“Oh, no,” Maddow replied.
“Yes,” Waters said.
“Can you hear me Madame Chair?” Maddows tried, as if talking to a child.
“Not that well,” Waters lamented.
Maddow tossed to a break, saying she was dispatching “a bunch of elves” to Waters’ studio to try to fix the awkward problem.
Coming back from the commercial, the problem continued.
Believing the “technical gremlins” had been eliminated, Maddow said, “Madame Chair, can you hear me?”
“Barely,” a perturbed Waters replied.
“I’ll talk loud, we’ll hope we work this out,” Maddow said.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Waters said.
“Oh, dear,” Maddow said, trudging on.
After the host asked a question, Waters asked her to repeat it.
After she did, Waters began to respond, only to awkwardly halt her answer mid-sentence.
“We tried to get information from Mnuchin…” she said, stopping and staring into the camera, fiddling with her earpiece for several moments of silence.
“I am going to call an audible here and say that we should bring the chairwoman back when we can fix this problem,” Maddow told her audience, adding it was “unfair” to Waters.
During an appearance in 2018, Waters told a California audience that Russia was out to silence her when another rant was marred by tech malfunctions.
“RT, which is Russian television, absolutely interfered with a speech of mine on the floor of Congress and blocked me out for 10 minutes,” she bellowed, as a woman in the audience gasped, “What?!?”
“They don’t play. They mean business,” Waters declared.
She was referring to a 2017 incident when C-SPAN briefly showed RT on its Internet feed. The TV broadcast wasn’t affected.
C-SPAN blamed the moment on an “internal routing error.”
Statement from C-SPAN about January 12 Online Signal Interruption pic.twitter.com/dlkSOntJgz
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 13, 2017
“We don’t believe that we were hacked,” the network said in a statement.
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