House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Sunday refused to disclose the details of his call with then-President Donald Trump during the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, when McCarthy allegedly implored Trump to call off his supporters who were ransacking the Capitol.
The GOP leader dodged when Fox News host Chris Wallace asked if Trump had told him “well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election then you are” during that call, as recounted by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA).
“What he ended the call was saying — telling me, he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this,” McCarthy told Wallace. “And that’s what he did. He put a video out later.”
He remained tight-lipped as Wallace pressed him on the incident, saying that “my conversations with the president are my conversations with the president.”
“I engaged in the idea of making sure we could stop what was going on inside the Capitol at that moment in time,” McCarthy said. “The president said he would help.”
Herrera Beutler, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection, has stood by her account that McCarthy had told her about Trump’s remark.
McCarthy’s evasiveness on the content of the call comes amid ongoing investigations into the attack on the Capitol, which took place following Trump’s fiery speech nearby that day.
Michael Sherwin, the former acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. who led the federal investigation into the insurrection, said last month that the ex-president’s role in the attack was being examined.
“Everything’s being looked at,” he told “60 Minutes.”
