On Monday, CNN’s Jake Tapper openly pondered if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) might seek to derail the commission on the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by appointing “members from his fringe nitwit caucus.”
As Congress prepares to convene the 1/6 commission, speculation is growing regarding how cooperative GOP leadership will be with the process, considering that the inquiry will focus, at least in part, on how former President Donald Trump and other Republicans may have helped instigate or prolong the riot.
Tapper introduced a video clip of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) discussing her recent ouster from House GOP leadership, and naming McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as complicit in Trump’s lies about the election.
Cheney has said that she expects, Tapper said, that the commission “will likely subpoena McCarthy if he refuses to testify over the conversations that he had with the president that day,” which could put the congressman “in a precarious position.”
Trump was going to “hate” this commission, replied CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger, because it would talk about what occurred on Jan. 6, “and key to what occurred that day is [Trump’s] conversation with McCarthy, and you alluded to it before, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people’ — meaning the insurrectionists — ‘are more upset about the election than you are,’ to which McCarthy said, ‘Who the ‘F’ do you think I am’ …and if [McCarthy is] testifying under oath he has to tell the truth about the president.”
Noting that the commission was “going to happen,” because Democrats controlled the majority in both the House and Senate, Tapper asked, “What are the odds that McCarthy puts, you know, a number of members from his fringe nitwit caucus on this committee?”
“That’s the thing, I think the odds are high,” said Nia-Malika Henderson.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene — Jim Jordan,” said Tapper as the rest of the panel nodded in agreement.
McCarthy should be able to name two members to the bipartisan committee, replied Henderson, “and then he has a say in who the vice chair is as well, so you can pack this committee with all sorts of people who would tout the lie.”
The Republicans would be able to issue a minority report, said Borger, noting how that had been done many times before, including with the Iran-Contra investigation. The issue, she continued, would be if the public believes the majority, and she thought it was “important” that the scope of the commission’s inquiry would be “narrowed down to what occurred on January 6th, not everything else that lots of Republicans wanted to throw into it.”
“But so many House Republicans are trying to rewrite history,” said Tapper.
Watch the video above, via CNN.
The post Jake Tapper: Will Kevin McCarthy Try to Derail 1/6 Commission By Appointing Marjorie Taylor Greene and Others From ‘Fringe Nitwit Caucus’? first appeared on Mediaite.
