Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican leader in the House of Representatives, feared after the Jan. 6 attack that several far-right members of Congress would incite violence against other lawmakers, identifying several by name as security risks in private conversations with party leaders.
Mr. McCarthy spoke with other Republicans in Congress about his desire to control a number of hardliners who were deeply involved in Donald J.’s efforts. Trump to challenge the 2020 election and undermine the peaceful transfer of power, according to an audio recording obtained from The New York Times.
But Mr McCarthy did not follow the tougher steps some Republicans encouraged him to take, instead choosing to seek a political agreement with the most extreme members of the GOP in the interests of advancing his own career.
Mr McCarthy’s remarks are one of the Republican leader’s most serious admissions that the party’s regular lawmakers played a role in inciting violence on January 6, 2021 – and pose a threat in the days following the Capitol attack. Audio recordings of the comments were obtained from reports on the upcoming book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for the Future of America.”
In a telephone conversation with other Republican leaders on Jan. 10, Mr McCarthy referred mainly to two representatives, Matt Goetz of Florida and Mo Brooks of Alabama, as threatening the security of other lawmakers and the Capitol complex. But he and his allies discussed several other representatives who made comments they found offensive or dangerous, including Lauren Boubert of Colorado and Barry Moore of Alabama.
The country was “too crazy,” Mr McCarthy said, for members to talk and tweet recklessly at such a precarious time.
Mr Brooks and Mr Gaetz were the main offenders in the eyes of Republican leaders. Mr Brooks addressed the January 6 rally at the National Mall, which preceded the Capitol riot, using incendiary language. After Jan. 6, Mr. Gaetz went on television to attack a number of Republicans who criticized Mr. Trump, including Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a member of the leadership team.
Mr Gaetz’s comments alarmed Mr McCarthy and his colleagues in the leadership – especially the reference to Mrs Cheney, who has already been the subject of threats and public abuse by Mr Trump’s faction in the party for criticizing the defeated president. .
“He puts people in danger,” Mr McCarthy told Mr Gaetz. “And he doesn’t need to do that. We saw what the people in the Capitol would do, you know, and these people came prepared with a rope, with everything else.
Louisiana’s Steve Scaliz, a Republican № 2 member of the House of Representatives, suggested that Mr. Gaetz could cross the legal line.
“What he is doing is potentially illegal,” Mr Scaliz said.
Referring to Mr Brooks, Mr McCarthy said the Trump loyalist had behaved even worse on Jan. 6 than Mr Trump, who told a crowd gathered at the National Mall to “fight like hell, before his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the vote count. Mr Brooks told the rally that it was “the day American patriots start taking names and kicking ass”.
“Do you think the president deserves to be impeachment for his comments?” Mr. McCarthy asked rhetorically. “It’s almost something that goes beyond what the president said.”
Speaking of regular lawmakers to his fellow leaders, Mr McCarthy was sharply critical and suggested he would tell them to stop their provocative behavior.
“Our members also need to start paying attention to what they are saying, and you can’t put up with that,” he said, adding swear words.
Mr McCarthy and Mr Scaliz did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Brooks on Tuesday rejected criticism of the Republican leader, noting that a lawsuit filed against him by a Democratic member of Congress for his January 6 speech had been dismissed in court.
“Kevin McCarthy spoke before he found out the facts,” Mr Brooks said, adding that he did not recall Mr McCarthy ever speaking directly to him about his speech.
During a telephone conversation on January 10, 2021, Mr. McCarthy spoke with a small group of Republican leaders, including Mr. Scaliz, Ms. Cheney and Representative Tom Emer of Minnesota, as well as a number of aides.
It was on this call to the Republican leadership that Mr McCarthy told his colleagues that he would call Mr Trump and tell him: ‘My recommendation is that you resign.’
The leader of the minority in the House of Representatives in recent days lied and tried to downplay his comments: Last week, after The Times reported the remarks, Mr McCarthy called the report “completely false and erroneous”. Following Mr McCarthy’s denial, a source who confidentially shared a recording of the conversation with the book’s authors agreed to allow The Times to publish parts of the audio recording. In the days since the recording was released to the public, the Republican leader reiterated his denial, stressing that he had never actually carried out his plan to force Mr Trump to step down.
Mr McCarthy’s comments, which present other Republican lawmakers as a threat to Congress, illustrate the difference between the way he spoke about his own party immediately after Jan. 6, the way he imagined strict confidence, and the way he who has interacted with these legislators in the 15 months since.
During a January 10 conversation, Mr McCarthy said he planned to talk to Mr Gaetz and asked him not to attack other MPs by name. The next day, at a larger meeting for all Republicans in the House of Representatives, Mr McCarthy called on lawmakers not to “incite” but rather to “respect each other”.
But in his determination to become Speaker of the House of Representatives after the 2022 election, Mr McCarthy has spent much of last year building a closer political partnership with the far right, showing little public concern that his most extreme colleagues could provoke bloodshed with their overheated or hateful rhetoric.
In recent months, Mr McCarthy has opposed the punishment of Republican members of Congress accused of inciting violence, including Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Green and Arizona’s Paul Gossar, who recently posted an animated video on social media depicts killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the Left Democrat.
In the case of Mr Gossar, Mr McCarthy told reporters that he had spoken to him about the video and noted that Mr Gossar had made a statement rejecting the violence. But Mr McCarthy opposed a resolution condemning Mr Gossar and removing him from his appointments to the committee.
Mr McCarthy also ignored Mr Brooks’s remark last year when, after a man was arrested in connection with the Capitol bombing, the Alabama Republican said he understood “citizens’ anger at dictatorial socialism and its threat to freedom , freedom and the very fabric of American society. “
Consequences of Capitol Riot: Key Developments
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Weighing the changes in the Uprising Act. On January 6, some members of the House of Representatives committee began discussions on rewriting the Uprising Act in response to the events that led to the Capitol riot. The law now gives presidents the power to deploy the military to respond to riots, and some fear it could be abused by a president trying to incite a riot.
However, immediately after January 6, Mr. McCarthy saw a clear link between the comments of some lawmakers and the potential for future violence. On January 10, he called on his fellow Republican leaders to keep a close eye on members such as Mr. Brooks and Mr. Gaetz and asked them to warn him if they saw any potentially dangerous public announcements.
Mr McCarthy said it was particularly unacceptable for lawmakers to attack other lawmakers with whom they disagreed on the outcome of the 2020 election: “These things must stop.”
“The country is too crazy,” Mr McCarthy said. “I don’t want to look back and think we did something or missed something and someone got hurt. I don’t want to play politics with any of this. “
During the conversation with the leadership, Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Scaliz and others discussed several other lawmakers who made provocative comments around January 6, including Mr. Moore and the representative Louis Homert from Texas. Ms. Cheney, who was present at the interview, suggested that Ms. Boubert posed a security risk, noting that she had tweeted publicly about the sensitive movements of other lawmakers during the January 6 evacuation.
Mr McCarthy also asked about Mrs Green and whether she had spoken at the January 6 rally.
Mr Moore, like Mr Brooks, a far-right conservative from Alabama, tweeted over the weekend after Jan. 6 about the fatal shooting of a Capitol rebel, Ashley Babbitt, noting that “this is a black police officer who shot the white veteran woman “and added:” You know that doesn’t fit the story. “
As soon as this comment was read aloud on the call, Mr McCarthy expressed a desire for major social media companies to ban some members of the Republican Conference, as they did with Mr Trump after the uprising.
“Can’t they take their Twitter accounts?” Mr. McCarthy asked.
Ms Boebert, Mr Gohmert, Ms Greene and Mr Gaetz did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Mr Moore declined to comment directly on Mr McCarthy’s remarks, but said in a statement that Republicans would be “more united than ever after regaining the House in November”.
Like his dealings with Mr Trump, Mr McCarthy quickly lost the will to stand up to the far right, including lawmakers who are most directly involved in fueling the January 6 uprising. His attitude towards Mr Brooks was an example of this.
During a January 10 conversation, Mr Scaliz told Mr McCarthy that some Republicans were talking about punishing Mr Brooks by depriving him of his appointments to the committee. Mr. McCarthy …
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