House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted he won’t support House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s calls for a bipartisan commission that focuses on the January 6 Capitol Riot without including a probe into Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed McCarthy to clearly state whether he would support a probe that hones in on the deadly riot, noting that Republicans vehemently supported a tightly-focused probe into the 2012 Benghazi, Libya murder of four Americans.
“Why not confine this committee to what happened on January 6 when there was an insurrection at the Capitol?” Wallace asked McCarthy, noting that in 2012 then-House GOP Leader John Boehner “set up the [Benghazi probe] and it was completely confined to the Benghazi murders.”
McCarthy complained that he was the one that requested the probe and that the press was making it a partisan issue. By his own logic, McCarthy admits that the January 6 insurrection attempt was executed by republican supporters. A focused probe would make that fact hard to avoid, and further highlight that it was a lie spread and supported by his party that caused the riot. Expanding it to discuss the summer civil rights protests would allow the republican party to claim the two are equivalent even though one was clearly about civil rights and the other an attempted coup.
McCarthy continued his deflections and attempts at equivalency by mentioning the recent capitol attack that killed one officer by a purported Nation of Islam member, stating “why wouldn’t you look at all the problems to solve?”
