SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Fresno Republican who has repeatedly blasted the panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection and questioned its necessity, said days after the riot he was "committed to make sure" there was a congressional inquiry into the deadly violence.
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In a Jan. 11, 2011 recording obtained by New York Times reporters and "This Will Not Pass" co-authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, McCarthy is heard telling Republican leaders that the party "cannot just sweep this under the rug" after hundreds of former President Donald Trump's supporters sought to violently keep him in office.
"We need to know why it happened, who did it, and people need to be held accountable for it," McCarthy said in the recording, which was played publicly for the first time on CNN on Wednesday night. "And I'm committed to make sure that happens."
Hours before the bipartisan House select committee's first hearing on Thursday, McCarthy – who said as recently February he agreed with labeling the attack aiming to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's 2020 win "a violent insurrection" – called the panel “the most political and least legitimate committee in American history” during a press conference alongside House Republican leaders.
McCarthy opposed legislation that passed in the House and fell six votes short in the Senate that would've established a bipartisan 10-member commission to investigate Jan. 6 styled after an inquiry into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He opposed the bill after New York Rep. John Katko – the House Homeland Security Committee's top Republican, whom McCarthy tasked with striking a deal on the commission's creation – drafted legislation alongside Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of committee.
The eight-term congressman, who has not complied with the House panel's subpoena, declined to answer on Thursday whether he believed Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election five times, saying only that Biden is president. McCarthy struck a much different tone days after the riot, during or after which four members of the crowd and U.S. Capitol Police officer died. Four officers have died by suicide following the insurrection.
"I made a phone call to the president telling him what was going on, asking him to tell these people to stop, to make a video and go out," McCarthy said in another recording. "And I was very intense and loud about it. He did put a tweet out, and later, he did put a video out. I told him I didn't like the video he put out later. But the second day, I wish that video was first."
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the select committee co-chair and a Republican whose primary opponent McCarthy has endorsed, said during Thursday's prime-time hearing that the panel has heard testimony alleging that Trump thought his supporters "were doing what they should be doing" when they stormed the Capitol and refused his inner circle's repeated requests to tell his followers to stand down.
Trump told Martin and Burns in "This Will Not Pass" that he and McCarthy "had not clashed over the phone with the riot still in progress." The former president told the authors that McCarthy claimed otherwise because of an "inferiority complex."
McCarthy, whom Trump endorsed in this week’s Republican primary, easily advanced to the November general election on Tuesday. Should Republicans regain control of the chamber this fall, he likely will succeed San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
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