During an appearance on MSNBC, Rick Wilson — a longtime conservative strategist who went on to co-found the anti-Trump conservative group known as The Lincoln Project — went after House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for his attempt to obstruct the work of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. After that committee recently sent out requests for telecommunications companies to preserve records of certain members of Congress with connections to the Capitol violence, McCarthy insisted that “a Republican majority will not forget” if the companies comply with duly issued demands. Wilson observed that the McCarthy wing of the GOP, as it stands, “isn’t a conservative political party.” Instead, he said, they’re a “bunch of authoritarian kleptocrats.”
Asked for his take on the possibility of McCarthy becoming Speaker if Republicans win the House, Wilson added as follows:
‘That’s the reason Kevin is doing this performative stuff… He’s doing that because he knows that there are now a large majority of the House who are bat-guano crazy. They are absolutely out of their damn minds… They know very well in Kevin McCarthy’s little tiny circle of allies that there’s a greater chance that Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene could be elected Speaker, or Donald Trump, than Kevin McCarthy. So he is gonna act like a jackass. He’s gonna do all this performative stuff. Because look, he thinks of himself as better and different than the rest of the people on the mutant parade that are on that list of other people getting subpoenas. He thinks of himself as much more elevated than those people. And he’s not. He’s rolling around, you know — lie down with dogs, get up with Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan and Mo Brooks and the rest of the kooks.’
Check out Wilson’s comments within the video segment below:
McCarthy — alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who also threatened telecommunications companies in connection to the riot investigation committee’s requests — was recently hit with a federal ethics complaint over these antics. The complaint was filed with the federal agency known as the Office of Congressional Ethics by the government watchdog group known as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which noted that “[threatening] retaliation for complying with legally valid document demands and preservation requests appears to violate 18 U.S.C. § 1505, which prohibits obstructing congressional investigations.”
