Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) on Friday blamed an anonymous staffer for the early rollout of the Green New Deal FAQ, which was widely-mocked for saying there would be a guarantee of economic security even for those "unwilling to work" and calling for the elimination of "farting cows."
During a town hall that aired on MSNBC Friday night, Ocasio-Cortez was asked by host Chris Hayes whether she thought that office rolled out the Green New Deal the right way.
"What I will say is that I definitely had a staffer that had a very bad day at work and did release a working draft early, so I get that that's what they are seizing on," Ocasio-Cortez said. "Really what we need to do is have a serious conversation and even in those draft versions what they were talking about is really about the fact that we need to innovate on technology."
She went on to reference "cow flatulence," prompting Hayes to interject, "It sounds ridiculous, but it literally is an issue."
"It is an issue when it comes to contributing to methane, but that doesn’t mean you end cows, it means we need to innovate and change our cow grain from which they feed in these troughs," Ocasio-Cortez said. "We need to really take a look at regenerative agriculture, like these are our solutions."
The Green New Deal frequently-asked-questions document was released and circulated by NPR in early February, but after it was widely-mocked, it disappeared from Ocasio-Cortez's website, including press releases or Green New Deal content on her media page, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Robert Hockett, a Cornell law professor and adviser to Ocasio-Cortez, even attempted to gaslight Fox New host Tucker Carlson over the FAQ, saying Republicans doctored official documents that came directly from Ocasio-Cortez's office.
"We never would and AOC has never said anything like that," Hockett said. "I think you're referring to some sort of document, some sort of doctored document that someone else has been circulating."
Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff would later admit that the FAQ was shared with NPR and posted on Ocasio-Cortez's website, but said it was "clearly unfinished."
"An early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished and that doesn’t represent the GND [Green New Deal] resolution got published to the website by mistake," Chakrabarti tweeted. "But what’s in the resolution is the GND."
Hockett would later concede that he was incorrect during his interview with Tucker Carlson.
"It appears there was more than one document being discussed yesterday, only one of which I had heard about with any definiteness by last evening after a long day of media appearances – namely, the one referred to by the Congresswoman in her tweet," he wrote in an email to The Daily Caller. "I regret that we seem unknowingly to have ended up speaking about different documents for a minute during our longer and otherwise ‘on-the-same-page’ conversation last night."