It’s been a pretty serious week in America, what with the conflict in Iran and terror attacks at home. In this midst of all this sobering news, we should all welcome a bit of levity.
In that vein, I give you Rep. Joyce Beatty, who started a major kerfuffle over the Trump administration’s behavior because she didn’t check her email spam folder.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Ohio Democrat, Beatty is an an ex-officio trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts who is filing a suit to stop President Donald Trump from adding his name to it. The suit was filed in December, according to CNN, and she’s loudly making her case that not only is this illegal, but the Trump administration is trying to shut her up.
Rep. Joyce Beatty says she was forcibly ‘muted’ when she tried to object to Thursday’s vote to rename the Kennedy Center.
Watch here: https://t.co/6oxjQ4Bc90 pic.twitter.com/gNSeDZ3sTX— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) December 18, 2025
Rep. Joyce Beatty told CBS News’ Nikole Killion that she was cut off on Thursday’s board call as she tried to express opposition to the Trump-Kennedy Center name change. The Ohio Democrat, who is an ex-officio member of the board, said that this was a regularly scheduled board… pic.twitter.com/CYSGtBCpDc
— CBS News (@CBSNews) December 19, 2025
🚨 BREAKING: Rep. Joyce Beatty says claims of a “unanimous” vote to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump-Kennedy Center are false.
Beatty, an ex officio board member, says she was on the call, repeatedly muted, and never allowed to speak, object, or vote — despite the White House… pic.twitter.com/6XBSyfN8yB
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) December 18, 2025
It sounds like they’re pretty afraid of Rep. Beatty — so afraid, in fact, that it sounded like they were trying to shut her out of the process completely.
As The Columbus Dispatch noted on Thursday, Beatty was “seeking a restraining order to make sure she could attend a board meeting and oppose the plan to close the center for two years” and “accused Trump in court filings of not inviting her to a Kennedy Center board meeting planned for next week at the White House.”
The Department of Justice insisted that she had been invited, which set both sides up for a showdown in court regarding the invite. Until, that is, she did what any individual who knows how to use the interwebs would have done: checked all her folders.
From The Hill:
In court filings last week, lawyers for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) said she had not been invited to a March 16 meeting where the plan to overhaul the center is set to be formalized.
But the Justice Department countered — and Beatty’s counsel later confirmed — that the congresswoman was in fact extended an invitation; it just went to her email spam folder.
“Plaintiff appreciates Defendants’ confirmation that she can attend the meeting at the White House,” her lawyers wrote, noting that, “upon further investigation,” the email was found tucked away in spam.
However, they said it “bears emphasis” that when Beatty searched for and could not find the email last week, the Kennedy Center’s executive director, Richard Grenell, and general counsel “ignored her for two days.”
TL;DR: Sure, the invite was extended, but Richard Grenell wasn’t available to do tech support for her!
“I doubt there’s a single person here who hasn’t had an email vanished somewhere in a spam filter,” lawyer Norm Eisen said after the Thursday hearing.
“That’s what happened here. But the important thing is the congresswoman checked and they were silent.”
No, the important thing is that your client doesn’t know this whole email thing works. Remember when GOP Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska went viral for years for describing the internet as “a series of tubes” back during a 2006 hearing? What’s hilarious is that this was actually an accurate (if somewhat simplistic) description of how data traffic really works, yet he never managed to live it down.
Rep. Beatty, meanwhile, made a point of trying to nail the Trump administration in court because she doesn’t know how this whole email-accidentally-going-to-your-spam-folder thing works, something that’s been common knowledge to anyone who’s used a computer in the post-Windows 95 era. And watch us forget about this by Monday.
And it’s not like this is going to make her happy: “Regardless, in any event, her being ‘permitted to attend’ does not come anywhere close to remediating her harms,” her lawyers said in court documents, according to NOTUS, adding that the spam folder snafu was totally explicable because “Plaintiff had reason to believe Defendants — who had already silenced her in the December meeting — had excluded her.”
Given her propensity toward faceplanting in federal court, they might have been doing her a favor.
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