Reacting to a letter sent by attorneys representing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to the House committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection that their client will not honor a subpoena to appear, the Bulwark's Amanda Carpenter claimed he that he is now an "active participant" in Donald Trump's cover-up.
Noting his lack of reasoning for all of his attempts to derail the committee's work since it was first proposed, the former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, suggested that there is more to his objections than meets the eye.
According to McCarthy's lawyers, he wants to see what questions they want to ask him as well as what documents they have on him before he would even consider appearing, which Carpenter finds telling.
As she wrote, McCarthy attorney Elliot S. Berke, "rejected the idea the committee had any legislative purpose."
Carpenter found this curious and was particularly struck by the attorney's closing passages.
"Berke closed his letter with a request: that the committee give McCarthy a list of all topics and subjects it would like to discuss, as well as copies of 'all documents' the committee would like to ask about, along with the 'constitutional and legal rationale' for each of those requests," she writes. "Which is lots of lawyer-speak for people who bill by fractions of the hour. What this request really meant was that McCarthy has absolutely no intention of acting as a cooperative witness. He wants information from the committee; he doesn't want to give them any."
As she notes, McCarthy is one of the few people working outside the White House who was in contact with Donald Trump as the riot progressed and could shed valuable light on his state of mind and intentions -- and yet is refusing to do so.
"What did Trump say when McCarthy begged him for help? Why is that being kept a secret? How could any official sit on this information—let alone a man who could very soon be speaker of the House?" she wrote before adding, "Also, how in the world did McCarthy go from blaming Trump for the attack to championing him for the midterms? No one in Washington with McCarthy's level of power has flipped harder and faster on such an important question than McCarthy did in those short days. It stands to reason that if McCarthy had an honorable explanation, he would be proud to give it. So what is he hiding?"
Writing that the cover-up is still ongoing, she added, "These questions, and more, need to be answered. Hopefully, some of them have already been answered by the hundreds of people who have spoken to investigators."
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