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- October 12, 2022
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In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, like a bunch of other top Republicans, read the room and realized it wouldn’t be a great look to defend the violent insurrection that had just taken place or give cover to the man who had incited said insurrection (i.e., outgoing president Donald Trump). Trump, McCarthy publicly declared, “bears responsibility for [the] attack on Congress.… He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” The minority leader reportedly went even further in private, telling several top House Republicans that the then president’s behavior on January 6 was “atrocious and totally wrong,” and that Trump was at fault for “inciting people” to attack the Capitol building.
In the end, of course, that tough talk was extremely short-lived. McCarthy didn’t vote to impeach Trump, and less than a month after the violent riot, he was reportedly already lining up to kiss Trump’s ring. But if you truly want to know just how far McCarthy had his head up Trump’s ass, new reporting from a forthcoming book sheds some helpful light.
In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release, reporters Karoun Demirjian and Rachael Bade reveal that almost two weeks after the Senate voted to acquit the 45th president, McCarthy exploded on a colleague for disclosing, before the conclusion of the trial, a conversation the House leader had had with Trump on the day of the riot, in which Trump came off looking exceptionally bad. According to Demirjian and Bade, the object of McCarthy’s ire was Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had confirmed to reporters that when the House leader had spoken to Trump on January 6, he begged the then president to call off the rioters, an appeal that Trump ignored. Though Trump was at this point no longer in danger of being convicted and barred from running for office again, he was nevertheless pissed at McCarthy, which deeply upset the spineless congressman.
“I alone am taking all the heat to protect people from Trump! I alone am holding the party together!” he reportedly screamed at Herrera Beutler. “I have been working with Trump to keep him from going after Republicans like you and blowing up the party and destroying all our work!” According to the authors, the congresswoman was shocked by McCarthy’s anger, and through tears, apologized to the minority leader. “You should have come to me!” McCarthy reportedly responded. “Why did you go to the press? This is no way to thank me!”
“What did you want me to do? Lie?” Herrera Beutler reportedly asked. “I did what I thought was right.”
The answer, of course, is that McCarthy definitely wanted Herrera Beutler to lie, and we know this because by April of 2021, he was doing that himself, having told Chris Wallace that (1) Trump had no idea what was going on at the Capitol and (2) that he “put something out” to stop it, even though Trump didn’t “put something out” until hours later, when he told the mob, “We love you.”
As Demirjian and Bade write in Unchecked, “McCarthy’s tirade against Herrera Beutler was just the start of what would become a GOP-wide campaign to whitewash the details of what happened on January 6 in the aftermath of the second impeachment.”
Not surprisingly, McCarthy has denied the details of the meeting with Herrera Beutler, and in a joint statement to the Post, the two said of the account: “Beyond multiple inaccuracies—it is dramatized to fit an onscreen adaptation, not to serve as a document of record. We know it’s wrong because we were the only two in the room for this conversation.” (McCarthy has a documented history of denying reporting concerning his conversations following January 6, and has been confronted with a recording of him saying the exact thing he insisted he never said. Will that once again be the case with Unchecked? Stay tuned!)
In other January 6/McCarthy news, on Monday, CNN revealed:
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