Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said that protesters who swarmed a town hall on Thursday in his home state are a “very, very small minority.”
“It doesn’t faze me,” Chaffetz said in an interview with the Washington Post published Sunday evening.
“It’s a very vocal, very frustrated, scorched-earth mentality that’s not representative of the average person, certainly not in Utah,” Chaffetz told the Post. “It might be in San Francisco or Seattle but not here. Not in middle America.”
The congressman, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, dismissed suggestions that he is overlooking President Donald Trump’s potential conflicts of interest at the President’s request.
Chaffetz said Trump told him in January during a Republican retreat in Philadelphia that he has “a job to do” and not to “slow down.”
“‘You go after everything you want to go after,’” Chaffetz said Trump told him.
In an interview Friday with the Deseret News, Chaffetz said that protesters at the town hall were part of “a concerted effort in part to just cause chaos” organized by Democrats.
He alleged that they were part of “a paid attempt to bully and intimidate,” but did not offer any evidence to support that claim.
