WASHINGTON — House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy says he has no regrets about having Republicans boycott the special committee probing the Jan. 6 riot, dismissing the investigation as a political hit job.
“This is nothing but a political show,” McCarthy told NBC News in an interview last week just off the House floor. “They already have the report written and they’re trying to create a narrative for it instead of trying to get to the truth.”
But with the Jan. 6 committee preparing to shift next month from the investigative phase to public, televised hearings, McCarthy’s decision last summer to shun the panel will face perhaps its biggest test.
Unlike the first Trump impeachment hearings in 2019, loyalists of the former president will not be in a position to “run interference,” in the words of one GOP source, during the Jan. 6 panel proceedings. Specifically, they won’t be able to aggressively cross-examine witnesses, rebut or interrupt Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and other Democrats, or introduce their own evidence.
Instead, the hearings will be tightly controlled and well-choreographed, focusing on areas like the plot to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory; intelligence and security breakdowns related to the attack; and what former President Donald Trump and his inner circle of him were doing during the hourslong riot that claimed several lives.
That’s opened McCarthy up to criticism from some fellow Republicans.
“I would say it’s absolutely a strategic mistake,” said a senior House GOP aide. “You’re going to have a united front, you’re not going to have a sideshow.
“One of the reasons Democrats’ impeachment hearings failed so spectacularly in 2019 was because you had [GOP Reps.] Elise Stefanik and Jim Jordan and Doug Collins and Mike Turner — all of them running interference because they were sitting on the panels,” the aid added. “And they were able to push back on whatever Democrats were trying to press Gordon Sondland and Fiona Hill about. They’re not going to have that time.”
McCarthy’s decision to yank his members off the Jan. 6 panel — a response to Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocking two of his picks — means pro-Trump Republicans largely have been left in the dark about what’s in store for the public hearings. Other than public reporting, Republicans aren’t aware of leads the committee is chasing, what witnesses are saying in the 750 depositions the panel has conducted in private, and what’s in the nearly 90,000 documents received by the panel.
“That’s an error,” the GOP aide said. “If Republicans were on a committee and were able to participate in any of this right now, they could be leaking things, they could be setting their own narratives.”
In that sense, Democrats aren’t complaining.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Jan. 6 committee and a constitutional law expert who led the 2021 impeachment team that prosecuted Trump for his role in the Capitol attack, said the absence of Trump allies on the panel has made their work easier.
“Institutionally, I think it was a terrible decision” for McCarthy to boycott the panel, Raskin said.
“Politically, I think it was a great decision, because we’re able to get work done,” he added with a grin.
McCarthy blames Trump, then backpedals
The Jan. 6 attack put many GOP lawmakers in a difficult spot — but especially McCarthy. As violence was unfolding at the Capitol, McCarthy called Trump and urged him to call off the violent mob of his supporters of him; an argument ensued and expletives were hurled.
A week later, McCarthy took to the House floor and declared that Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot and should have taken action when he saw the violence unfolding. But after he saw the conservative base was siding with Trump, McCarthy quickly reversed course.
Months later, when Thompson struck a deal with Rep. John Katko, RN.Y., on legislation to create an independent 9/11-style bipartisan commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, McCarthy came out in opposition, even though he had directed Katko to reach a compromise with Thompson.
With the independent commission stalled, Pelosi unilaterally launched a House select committee. But she rejected two of McCarthy’s five picks for the panel — GOP Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana — saying they had made statements that could jeopardize the “integrity of the election.”
Pelosi told McCarthy she would seat the three other Republicans — Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Troy Nehls of Texas — and suggested he pick two others. McCarthy refused and pulled all Republicans off the panel.
If McCarthy wouldn’t make the panel a bipartisan body, then Pelosi would. She added two of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over Jan. 6: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. The other seven members are Democrats.
The GOP’s rival investigation
More than eight months after those chess moves, McCarthy — who is the favorite to replace Pelosi as speaker if Republicans win back the House in November — is standing by his decision.
He called it unprecedented for Pelosi to block the minority leader from choosing members of a select committee, and said Republicans are carrying out their own probe into security lapses on Jan. 6, breakdowns he has repeatedly blamed on Pelosi and the Democrats.
“The speaker wants control of who the minority leader could put on the committee. Is she concerned about what we find out?” McCarthy said in his interview with NBC News.
“So we’ve been doing our own investigation. We got the sergeant-at-arms and the Capitol Police to participate with us. We’ll have our report,” he continued. “It will really [get at] the truth of why we were so ill-prepared that day, what were the decisions made to make us ill-prepared, and what can we do to make sure that that never happens again.”
Nehls, a former Fort Bend County sheriff, said he’s helping with the competing GOP investigation and plans to turn over his findings to McCarthy.
“We will expose the truth, no question about it,” he said.
But Nehls conceded that Republicans like himself would have been able to combat Democrats in televised Jan. 6 hearings if they had stayed on the select committee.
“There is no question about that,” Nehls said. “Maybe that’s why [Pelosi] didn’t want me on the committee.”
Pelosi had said she was fine with Nehls serving on the panel, even though he was one of 120 Republicans who voted to challenge the certification of 2020 election results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania. Those votes were “not my criteria” for using Banks and Jordan, she said.
In a brief interview, Jordan panned the committee as a “complete political operation,” while another top Trump ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said Democrats and the media need to get over Jan. 6.
“The American people are fed up with this over-dramatization of a riot that happened here at the Capitol one time,” said Greene, who argued that Americans are more focused on border security, inflation and high gas prices.
“They are sick and tired of Jan. 6 — it’s over, OK?”
www.nbcnews.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism