‘Morning Joe’ Wonders Whether McCarthy Just Hurt His Chances To Be Speaker (VIDEO)

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Thursday morning that bragging about the special Benghazi committee’s political victories was a “rookie mistake” that may damage House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) bid for the speakership.

“This comes right as he moves to take over,” Scarborough said of the putative next House speaker on “Morning Joe.” “Well, what a rookie mistake.”

Democrats and Republicans alike criticized McCarthy after he credited the House Select Committee on Benghazi with lowering Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“Morning Joe” panelist and Bloomberg Politics editor Jon Heilemann also speculated that McCarthy’s remarks would damage him in two ways. First, Heilemann said, McCarthy cited the Benghazi committee as one of his top accomplishments as GOP leader rather than an actual act of governing. Second, he said, McCarthy deviated from Chairman Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) and other Republicans’ talking points about the committee being nonpartisan and not a “witch hunt.”

“It gives her [Clinton] a huge talking point, undermines Gowdy and makes, I think, a lot of people in the Republican caucus wonder whether Kevin McCarthy is in fact up to the job of being speaker of the House,” Heilemann said.

Watch below:

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Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for mantan mantan says:

    Wasn’t ‘Rookie Mistake’ the name of Marco Rubio’s yacht?

  2. ‘Morning Joe’ Wonders Whether McCarthy Just Hurt His Chances To Be Speaker

    Ya think?

  3. Someone throw a dead intern at this douche. He basically just called it a “rookie mistake” that McCarthy was incapable of preventing the truth from falling out of his yap. He’s basically admitting that the GOP/Teatrolls should be seeking a leader who is better at obfuscation.

  4. REPUBLICANS CAN’T WIN NATIONAL ELECTIONS WHEN THEY ARE HONEST ABOUT WHAT THEY BELIEVE AND WHO THEY ARE

    Today’s Republicans don’t believe that being HONEST is a desirable quality in a Republican “leader”.

    Today’s Republicans REQUIRE their “leaders” to be DISHONEST…because Republicans LOSE NATIONAL ELECTIONS when they are HONEST about what they believe and who they are!

  5. Avatar for tao tao says:

    For our Republican brethren to use words like stupid, rookie, and insubordinate (if they were allowed to use a word with more than eight letters) to describe one of their own, does not mean they are sorry or embarrassed in the least. Nope. They are simply following their tradition of throwing him to the wolves.

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