How Kevin McCarthy attacked House Democrats for ‘lying’ while telling ‘blatant lies’ himself: reporter

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy drew widespread criticism from Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for removing Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell, both of California, from the House Intelligence Committee. McCarthy cited “lying” as the reason for his decision, though he has no problem with Rep. George Santos, a Queens/Long Island Republican on the House Science Committee. Santos, according to publications ranging from The New York Times to NBC News, lied repeatedly during his 2022 campaign.

For McCarthy’s critics, excluding Schiff and Swalwell from the intelligence committee is pure partisanship. In an article published by Mother Jones on Jan. 25, journalist Abigail Weinberg lays out a few reasons why McCarthy’s arguments against members of Congress “don’t hold water.”.

“In 2019 and 2020,” Weinberg observes, “Schiff was the lead official in the impeachment proceedings against former President Trump. The investigation was triggered by a whistleblower’s complaint suggesting that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. McCarthy suggested that Schiff had information about the whistleblower that he wasn’t sharing with the public…

A member of Schiff’s staff met with the whistleblower – a fact Schiff denied when he spoke to the media. But there’s no evidence that Schiff knew who the whistleblower was, as Glenn Kessler explains in the Washington Post.

Weinberg adds, “McCarthy also accused Swalwell of lying about his apparent relationship with a Chinese spy, for which the FBI had cleared him of wrongdoing…. Both Schiff and Swalwell engaged in the kind of spin and exaggeration common among politicians. But it’s clear that McCarthy is selecting moments of dishonesty to remove the most outspoken Democratic politicians from one of the most important committees in Congress.

In addition, Weinberg writes in her Mother Jones article, McCarthy told a “blatant lie” when he said he “never called” on former President Donald Trump to “resign” after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Weinberg notes, played an actual recording of McCarthy calling for Trump to resign on her show.

Read Mother Jones full story at this link.