Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
In tape, McCarthy feared violence
Failure to punish Jan. 6 speaker angered state’s Womack
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, feared in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack that several members of Congress would incite violence against other lawmakers, identifying several by name as security risks in private conversations with party leaders.
His remarks were made in a Jan. 10, 2021, audio recording released Tuesday by The New York Times.
According to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, McCarthy talked to other congressional Republicans about wanting to rein in multiple hard-liners who were deeply involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election and undermine the peaceful transfer of power, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.
But McCarthy did not follow through on the sterner steps that some Republicans encouraged him to take, opting instead to seek a political accommodation.
In the phone call with other Republican leaders on Jan. 10, McCarthy referred chiefly to Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Mo Brooks of Alabama as endangering the security of other lawmakers and the Capitol complex. But he and his allies discussed several other representatives who made comments they saw as offensive or dangerous, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Barry Moore of Alabama.
Brooks and Gaetz were the prime offenders in the eyes of party leaders. Brooks addressed the Jan. 6 rally on the National Mall, which preceded the Capitol riot, using incendiary language. After Jan. 6, Gaetz went on television to attack multiple Republicans who had criticized Trump, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a member of the leadership team.
Those comments by Gaetz alarmed McCarthy and his colleagues in leadership — particularly the reference to Cheney.
“He’s putting people in jeopardy,” McCarthy said of Gaetz. “And he doesn’t need to be doing this. We saw what people would do in the Capitol.”
On Tuesday night, Gaetz responded with a blistering statement, castigating McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise as “weak men.”
“While I was protecting President Trump from impeachment, they were protecting Liz Cheney from criticism,” he said.
McCarthy said Brooks behaved even worse on Jan. 6 than Trump, who told the crowd assembled on the National Mall to “fight like hell” before his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count. Brooks told the rally that it was “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”
“You think the president deserves to be impeached for his comments?” McCarthy asked rhetorically. “That’s almost something that goes further than what the president said.”
McCarthy and Scalise did not respond to a request for comment.
Brooks on Tuesday dismissed McCarthy’s criticism and noted that a lawsuit brought against him by a Democratic member of Congress for his Jan. 6 speech had been dismissed in court.
“Kevin McCarthy spoke before knowing the facts,” Brooks said, adding that he did not recall McCarthy ever speaking with him directly about his speech.
Much like his handling of Trump, McCarthy quickly lost his will to confront the far right, including the lawmakers most directly involved in spurring the Jan. 6 riot. His handling of Brooks was a case in point.
On the Jan. 10 call, Scalise told McCarthy that there was talk among some Republicans of punishing Brooks by stripping him of his committee assignments. McCarthy did not respond to the idea directly but inquired what committees Brooks had seats on.
A push to punish Brooks came from within the Republican steering committee, an influential organizing panel that hands out committee seats to members of the party. One member of the committee, Rep. Steve Womack, a retired National Guard colonel from Arkansas, was horrified by Brooks’ conduct and led the charge to punish him.
At the first session of the steering committee after Jan. 6, Womack played tape of Brooks’ speech for his colleagues, including McCarthy.
“I saw jaws drop,” said Womack, a sober- minded conservative usually loyal to party leadership, in an interview for the book.
By Womack’s account, McCarthy asked to postpone dealing with Brooks until the next meeting of the steering committee. But when the body convened again later in January, McCarthy had already lost his appetite for taking on Brooks.
Womack quit the steering committee in protest, warning McCarthy and his colleagues that Republicans would come to regret their refusal to take action.
“I cannot tell you how angry I was,” Womack said.
He sent a resignation letter to McCarthy but received no response.
McCarthy’s handling of the episode, Womack said, “demonstrated a lack of leadership.”
During the Jan. 10, 2021, phone call, McCarthy was speaking with a small group of Republican leaders, including Scalise, Cheney and Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, as well as a number of aides.
McCarthy’s comments casting other Republican lawmakers as a menace within Congress illustrate the difference between how he spoke about his own party right after Jan. 6 and the way he has interacted with those lawmakers in the 15 months since then.
On the Jan. 10 call, McCarthy said he planned to speak with Gaetz and ask him not to attack other lawmakers by name. The following day, in a larger meeting for all House Republicans, McCarthy pleaded with lawmakers not to “incite” but rather to “respect one another.”
In recent months, McCarthy has opposed punishing Republican members of Congress who have been accused of inciting violence. Yet immediately after Jan. 6, McCarthy saw a clear link between the comments of some lawmakers and the potential for future violence.
On Jan. 10, he urged his fellow Republican leaders to keep a close eye on members like Brooks and Gaetz and asked them to alert him if they saw any potentially dangerous public communications.
On the leadership call, McCarthy, Scalise and others discussed several other lawmakers who had made provocative comments around Jan. 6, including Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas. Cheney, who was on the call, suggested Boebert was a security risk, pointing out that she had publicly tweeted about the sensitive movements of other lawmakers during the Jan. 6 evacuation.
Boebert and Gohmert did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moore declined to comment directly on McCarthy’s remarks, but in a statement he predicted that Republicans would be “more united than ever after taking back the House this November.”