The Deadline White House gang was aghast at the threat tweeted out by SITTING CONGRESSMAN Matt Gaetz while they were on the air — on the eve of Michael Cohen's testimony before an open session of Congress.

Donny Deutsch, who is a friend of Cohen's, said, "This is a congressman. You are SCUM."

Aaron Blake, reporter for The Washington Post asked, "Was this just the congressman freelancing, or was this something, maybe somebody whispered in his ear and said he needed to put out there?...This is a very specific charge that, and maybe other people have heard things that I haven't, I hadn't heard of this one before, so where is this coming from? Certainly the fact that it comes out the day before Michael Cohen is delivering testimony in public on Wednesday is hard to dismiss as a coincidence. This is really pretty evident what he is trying to do, and that is to rattle Michael Cohen."

Nicolle Wallace drew connections between this and what The New York Times reported last week about the Mueller investigation, noting that Trump had encouraged Gaetz to keep up his attacks on Robert Mueller. She said of Gaetz, "He has played Trump's stooge before, in earlier episodes."

According to Mother Jones, despite the fact that Walter Shaub tweeted within minutes that Gaetz had just committed felony witness tampering, the Trump a$$-licking Congressman from Florida denied such a charge. He called it, instead, "witness testing."

Gaetz’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but the Florida Republican denied to a Vox reporter that he was tampering with a congressional witness. “I’m witness testing,” Gaetz said. “We still are allowed to test the veracity and character of witnesses, I think.”

Yeah, right. Let's see what Mueller calls it.

As always, Twitter had thoughts. My faves are the legal eagles.

And on Wikipedia, people had some fun:

(for those without -20/20 vision, it's a Wikipedia entry for the term "Part-Time Job", which reads, "Sometime during 2019, Gaetz decided to do some federal witness tampering and blackmail on the side -- mistakenly believing, perhaps, that this is not a jailable criminal offense.")

Some went straight to Mueller.

As if Mueller wasn't aware of it a microsecond after the tweet was sent...