While Republicans spent Wednesday shedding fake tears over the implication that doing racist things in fact makes them racists; obsessing over whether or not the president‘s former fixer has a book deal in the works; ceding time so Jim Jordan could try and fail miserably to land gotcha questions; and generally defending Donald Trump like he’s got golden-shower footage of them, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used her five minutes to surgically question Michael Cohen about a matter of keen interest to at least half the country: Trump’s elusive tax returns.

Specifically, the freshman congresswoman asked the guy who was Trump’s lawyer for a decade if the former real-estate developer:

All of which Cohen responded to affirmatively, as he did to the question of whether or not it would be helpful for the committee to take a look at Trump’s federal and state tax returns.

In other words, A.O.C. laid the groundwork for the committee to obtain the stuff the president has been trying to keep hidden for more than two years now, claiming that he’d love to make good on his promise to release his tax returns but his hands are tied because of a routine audit. Speaking of which: