“When the whistleblower complaint came out, Democrats were alleging all these sinister things by the president,” Scalise said. “A lot of our members starting having questions. It was hard to get facts.”

Scalise brought in Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, John Ratcliffe, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, and others who were playing key roles in the impeachment proceedings to brief rank-and-file members. Interest was high; sometimes as many as 100 members attended.

“I wanted to do that especially for impeachment because, when Schiff was doing the secret depositions, a story would leak, and then the hearing would be in secret,” Scalise said. “The story was already out, and the narrative was already out that something bad had happened. They’d be building it up as some bombshell, and our members did not know what was going on. I wanted to have our members know as much as possible.”

The briefings stopped once the impeachment hearings went public and members could see for themselves what was happening.