On January 10th, just 5 days after the Insurrection Kevin McCarthy got on the phone with other congressional leaders — including Liz Cheney — and discussed options for removing Trump from office including the 25th Amendment, his potentially being Impeached and removed by the Senate and also McCarthy calling Trump and telling him to resign.
McCarthy earlier today denied this report from the NYTimes, and tonight Rachel Maddow played an audio tape of this conversation live on the air.
Excepts:
"In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics," The New York Times reported. "Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times."
McCarthy denied the report.
"In a statement on Twitter, Mr. McCarthy called the reporting 'totally false and wrong.' His spokesman, Mark Bednar, denied that the Republican leader told colleagues he would urge Mr. Trump to leave office. “McCarthy never said he’d call Trump to say he should resign,” Mr. Bednar said," the newspaper reported.
Following McCarthy's denial, reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of The Times provided the tape to Maddow.
The host played it on air, "so that you can know that when Kevin McCarthy denied that this happened, he is not telling the truth.
The call was with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who on Thursday was announced as a 2022 Profile in Courage award recipient. The Kennedy family and John F. Kennedy Library Foundation have been giving out the award since 1989.
Later in her program, Maddow suggested that McCarthy may soon himself resign for being caught in a blatant lie.
"I don't mean to be pollyanna about this at all, or naïve," Maddow said. "But it seems to me that I expect a sort of level — from politicians, in particular — of saying one thing in public and saying it another way in private. Certainly speaking more harshly, less diplomatic terms in private."
"What I don't expect is — for even public officials, even politicians — to flat out lie about what they have said, when it is on the record, when they have reason to believe it might have even been recorded, and they just lie and deny it happened," she explained.
"I think this creates a real problem for Mr. McCarthy, I think he must at least apologize, I would not be surprised if there are calls for his resignation, for him lying and denying that he did this when in fact he did it," she said.
What remains to be explained is why McCarthy turned from this position to again becoming a supplicant to Donald Trump and also why he lied about this when it could so easily be disproven? Also, since Liz Cheney was on the call — and McCarthy knew that — he had to know that she could confirm what he said and that since she was subsequently bounced from Congressional leadership she would no reason not to come forward with the truth. Just why did McCarthy and also McConnell turn around and turn against Cheney the way they have when at one point — they were all on the same exact page?
Sadly, the truth and the documented facts of this matter may not actually matter in the long run. We have our news sources and McCarthy has his. I would expect, within seconds, there will be a full-court press to deny and obfuscate this tape from the Wing-nut media, just as they had previously white-washed the damning text messages that their own people in Congress and on Fox News sent to Mark Meadows on Insurrection Day where many of them were begging for Trump to come forward and make a statement to cause the attack to stop. But he didn’t do it until hours later.
They will do everything they can to sweep this under the rug, to attack the New York Times and Rachel Maddow. They will probably accuse them of being “Groomers” — particularly Maddow since she’s gay — and of indoctrinating children into something or the other.
In the end, this report may not make a real difference, but it should.