What a vision of sick cowardice. There’s no other way of describing Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy after watching a press conference Thursday in which he ticked through a list of subversive conspiracy theories to deflect against questions about the reality that Donald Trump invited foreign governments to manipulate our elections. Here’s several of his talking points from the press conference—not a single one of them is true. In fact, they are all patently false.
1) McCarthy claimed reporters were asking about “a hypothetical” when they asked him if Trump was wrong to invite electoral help from a foreign government.
“You’re talking about a hypothetical,” McCarthy said, repeating the word several times throughout the press conference. Whether he meant that the scenario of Trump accepting foreign help was a hypothetical or that saying he would accept help was a hypothetical, both are lies. Trump enthusiastically welcomed Russia’s help in 2016 when he said, “Russia, if you’re listening...” and proceeded to ask Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. That happened. The world saw it. Nothing hypothetical about it.
And there’s also nothing hypothetical about Trump saying he would do it all over again. “They have information—I think I’d take it," Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about a foreign government.
2) Trump doesn’t want foreign “interference.”
Oh, yes, he does. He asked for it in 2016 and invited it again Wednesday night. What McCarthy is speciously suggesting is that just because Trump welcomed “information” from a foreign government, doesn’t mean he wants “interference.” In other words, the two things are different. Here’s what Trump said:
"If somebody called from a country—Norway—we have information on your opponent—oh. I think I’d want to hear it," Trump said.
"You want that kind of interference in our elections?" Stephanopoulos queried.
"It’s not an interference, they have information—I think I’d take it," Trump responded without missing a beat.
Getting information from a foreign government is interference. It means you are relying on a foreign government to win the election and you will then owe your presidency to them if you win. Just because Trump either doesn’t understand that or is lying about it, doesn’t mean that it’s not true and doesn’t put the nation in peril of being beholden to a foreign power. McCarthy is lying when he says Trump’s isn’t necessarily inviting interference when he’s welcoming information from a foreign power.
3) The Democrats did it first and they are responsible for this whole mess.
The first two were pretty garden variety GOP lies: don’t believe what you see or hear and a willful blurring of reality. But now McCarthy starts peddling a conspiracy theory of the greatest magnitude, claiming that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign accepted help from a foreign government and that Democrats weaponized the U.S. government against Trump’s campaign. This is an amalgamation of McCarthy’s responses to several different questions.
“They actually funded the entity that went through and put us through this special counsel,” McCarthy said of Democrats, presumably referring to the funding of the Steel Dossier and the boldfaced lie that it somehow served as the basis for launching the counterintelligence probe into Russia’s election meddling. This has been debunked repeatedly.
He continued: “They utilized the FISA court to spy on Americans to falsify the salacious lies in this process that's put America into this tailspin.” So McCarthy is saying Obama’s administration duped the FISA courts into approving surveillance of certain members of Trump’s campaign so they could fabricate lies about Trump that led to the special counsel appointment. Brilliant, Democrats must also be responsible then for forcing Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey and then convincing Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller.
McCarthy later hits that debunked and reckless lie again, with more vehemence, fervor, and outrage. “They utilized our own FBI to go after Americans by using a FISA court with false information that they knew and they paid for,” he said, “That is not a hypothetical, that is what took place in this country, that is why we went to a special counsel. … Within the Democratic party, they funded this. Where is the outrage there?”
McCarthy called it a “fact” and “proven” that the Democratic party spent millions trying to “drum something up and when they could not drum it up, they made it up.” That is neither fact, nor proven. That is a bald-faced lie.
4) Paying a foreigner to collect opposition research on your opponent is morally and legally equivalent to accepting help from a foreign government.
Wrong again, McCarthy. He repeatedly said that Democrats had engaged in the exact conduct that reporters were doggedly questioning him about related to Trump. It’s true that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to collect research about Trump and the organization contracted with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to do key portions of that research. But there’s nothing illegal or improper about paying a foreigner to collect opposition research. And because it’s not illegal, that foreigner can’t come back and blackmail you if you win. Accepting anything “of value” from a foreign government is statutorily illegal and therefore can be used as leverage against a candidate who wins elected office. What Clinton’s campaign did was legal. What Trump said he would happily do is illegal. One doesn’t pose a national security risk to our country, the other does.
Watch GOP Leader McCarthy lie to the American people to prop up Trump.
You can also watch the entirety of the depths the GOP has sunk to here if you can stomach it.