Comer Abandons Hearing With DC Mayor After Police Clear ‘Illegal’ George Washington University Encampment

The House Oversight Committee will not hold a hearing with the District of Columbia’s mayor after she sent in the metropolitan police to clear an anti-Israel encampment on George Washington University’s campus early Wednesday morning, the panel’s chairman announced. Despite the cancellation of this hearing, however, House Republicans’ probes of American colleges and universities show no signs of waning. The chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, asked Mayor Muriel Bowser and the chief of the metropolitan police to testify before his panel on Wednesday after he and his colleagues visited GW’s campus last week. Mr. Comer said because Ms. Bowser cleared the encampment, the hearing with the mayor would no longer be necessary. “Following the Metropolitan Police Department finally clearing out the unlawful encampment on GW’s campus, I am very pleased to announce that the hearing with Mayor Bowser has been canceled,” Mr. Comer said in a statement. “I had a good conversation with Mayor Bowser: I thanked her for finally clearing the trespassers off the GW Campus. It was unfortunate the situation at GW forced the Oversight Committee to act; however it was apparent that the DC police force was not going to do their job.”He said he was “pleased that the potential Oversight hearing led to swift action by Mayor Bowser.”The protests on the GWU campus grew rhetorically dark at certain points, with students putting on mock trials for university officials and calling for their executions. Students chanted, “Guillotine, Guillotine, Guillotine, Guillotine!” at a “People’s Tribunal” after finding the university president, the provost, the board of trustees, and the university police “guilty” for their involvement in “genocide.”After weeks of refusing to clear the anti-Israel encampment at the heart of GW’s campus — despite pleas from university leadership — the metropolitan police removed the protesters and their tents around three o’clock in the morning on Wednesday. “This morning, working closely with the GW administration and police, MPD moved to disperse the demonstrators from the GW campus and surrounding streets,” the police said in a statement. According to the university newspaper, the GW Hatchet, more than 30 demonstrators were arrested during the operation. The charges included assault of a police officer and unlawful entry, according to a police press release. The breakup of the protest came after more than a week of pleading from the university’s president, Ellen Granberg. She asked metropolitan police to break up the encampment the day it was set up, but was rebuffed. In a letter to the GW community on Sunday, the president said: “What is currently happening at GW is not a peaceful protest protected by the First Amendment or our university’s policies. The demonstration, like many around the country, has grown into what can only be classified as an illegal and potentially dangerous occupation of GW property.”Since the October 7 attacks in Israel and the ensuing anti-Israel demonstrations on college and university campuses across the country, House Republicans have found a new zeal for investigating and pressuring higher education officials to crack down on the demonstrations. In December — at a disastrous hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee — the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all failed to explicitly condemn the harassment of Jewish students on campus. Two of the school presidents later had to resign. On the same day Columbia University’s president was testifying before the same committee, the infamous Columbia encampment was set up. The school’s president, Minouche Shafik, has faced calls for her resignation from both congressional Republicans and the left-wing protesters who occupied the Morningside Heights green.

Comer Abandons Hearing With DC Mayor After Police Clear ‘Illegal’ George Washington University Encampment

Comer Abandons Hearing With DC Mayor After Police Clear ‘Illegal’ George Washington University Encampment

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