WASHINGTON—Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) overly cautious approach to investigating allegations involving the Biden family and mismanaging the Republican congressional campaign in 2022 contributed to his historic ouster in October.
His fall was precipitated by eight disaffected Republicans, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), acting in concert with the House minority of 212 Democrats. Mr. McCarthy has argued that he would still be speaker but for the intense personal animosity of Mr. Gaetz.
The resolution was prompted by the FBI’s refusal to provide the committee with subpoenaed copies of an FBI form that documented allegations by a trusted bureau informant that President Joe Biden was involved with a foreign bribery scheme while serving as the vice president of the United States.
Besides Mr. Comer and the oversight panel, the Biden investigation has included extensive parallel work by the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.).
However, the next day, instead of the contempt resolution going forward from his committee to the House floor, Mr. Comer accepted a compromise with Mr. Wray that allowed only selected members of the congressional panel to review highly redacted versions of the record, contained in an internal FBI Form FD-1023.
The review was conducted “in camera,” meaning the redacted form could only be viewed, without copies being made.
It wasn’t the threat of a contempt citation, however, that induced Mr. Wray to let House GOP investigators get a limited peek at the document they had been seeking for months.
It was the intervention by Mr. McCarthy, whose alternative offer gave Mr. Wray an escape hatch, according to congressional and oversight sources interviewed by The Epoch Times. Those sources argue that such actions by Mr. McCarthy were among the key factors in creating the conditions that led to his unprecedented removal.
For Mr. McCarthy, though, the Wray compromise was a positive step.
While Mr. McCarthy’s intervention avoided a contempt vote on the House floor that could have divided Republicans, it also allegedly slowed the GOP investigation and undercut the Oversight panel chairman.
“McCarthy is a political animal,” a former senior congressional staff investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Epoch Times.
“He’s a vote counter and reflects wherever the center of the [House Republican] conference is. So his tenure was about avoiding things that showed divides within the conference.
“They have set up a system—that we advised them to change—in which the speaker’s office must necessarily weigh in arbitrarily on internal disputes as it relates to oversight,” the source said.
The source said Mr. McCarthy’s alternative offer had the effect of “clearly undermining James Comer. Comer’s staff has already written the contempt report, ready to rock and roll, but McCarthy pulls the rug out from under them at the last minute.”
“Why? Because he knows a contempt vote has to go to the floor but there the [moderate Republicans] will shoot it down and McCarthy will be in the middle of a political dispute in the conference,” the source said. “This happened over and over with McCarthy.”
Oversight committees are empowered under House rules to decide whether to issue contempt citations, but “McCarthy wanted to maintain control,” the source said.
Caution Over Strength
Two members of the oversight committee who asked not to be identified confirmed the senior investigator’s account to The Epoch Times, saying colleagues on the panel weren’t happy with Mr. McCarthy’s intervention. A spokesman for Mr. Comer didn’t recall the incident.However, an individual close to Mr. McCarthy said the former speaker was asked by the Oversight chairman to call the FBI director, and referred to contemporary news stories reporting the requested call.
Mr. McCarthy didn’t respond to the host’s mention that Mr. Comer had asked him to contact Mr. Wray.
The same individual further pointed out that Mr. McCarthy strongly believes in protecting the efficacy of congressional contempt by only resorting to it if all other avenues fail to produce the desired result.
“The process has to play out, because if you just shoot the bullet by holding somebody in contempt while not getting the information you want, then all of your leverage is gone ... There is a natural push-and-pull between Congress and the Executive that the founders envisioned.”
Eventually, the complete 1023—with redactions to protect FBI sources—became public, but only because a whistleblower gave it to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who was also investigating allegations of foreign influence-peddling by President Biden and members of his family, including son Hunter, and brothers Frank and James.
“While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers,” Mr. Grassley said.
“What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long? The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, complimented Mr. McCarthy’s handling of the Biden investigations, telling The Epoch Times that he talked regularly with the three committee chairmen and their key staff members, and wasn’t aware of dissatisfaction with the leadership.
Mr. Gingrich praised Mr. McCarthy for “pulling together the three committees for the purpose of coordinating and maximizing their efforts. I was briefed at great length by Comer’s team, and I routinely worked with both the speaker’s staff and in particular with Comer’s staff.”
“What I think McCarthy was doing, which I agree with totally, was saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to methodically get this stuff organized and you’ve got to make the case in such a form that the American people decide that you’re right and it doesn’t just become a partisan witch-hunt that will never get anywhere,” he said.
The former speaker said Mr. McCarthy’s problem “was with 4 percent” of House Republicans.
Young Guns Unlocked
A former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC)—the main campaign arm of House Republicans—agreed with the “political animal” description of the former speaker and said Mr. McCarthy had “no program” in his oversight of the NRCC.“Kevin has always wanted to be speaker and two years ago when we were in the minority, he literally ran the NRCC,” the former NRCC chief said. “He’s never before run the NRCC and he didn’t know what he was doing. It takes a division of labor but the way he did it, he didn’t use what we’ve had for a long time, and that is the Young Guns.”
The NRCC Young Guns program was conceived and launched during the 2008 campaign season to recruit high-quality House GOP congressional candidates, especially those well-suited to particular districts.
While the initial effort only netted four freshmen winners, the Young Guns effort became a much more prominent NRCC program during the Tea Party campaign of 2010.
Led by an expanded Young Guns effort under then-NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), House Republicans picked up 63 seats in 2010, the party’s biggest congressional victory since 1946. Of the 94 freshmen in the 112th Congress, 85 were Republicans, including 62 Young Guns.
But the Young Guns program was an afterthought under Mr. McCarthy, according to the former NRCC chairman, who said the speaker used it primarily to curry favor with former President Donald Trump and build support for his campaign to be elected speaker in January 2023.
“They didn’t have a Young Guns program until after Labor Day 2021, and so what happened is he had no program. He went to Trump and let that organization pick who our nominees were going to be. If you are NRCC chairman, you understand politics, not power to make you speaker,” the former NRCC chairman said.
“Trump, while being an awesome vote-getter for us and very much strong on messaging, he plays well in some ways, and in other ways, he doesn’t play so well. You can’t say in every district we’re going to go get a Trump person. You have to look at them and say, ‘That’s not a Trump district, so let’s not waste our time by getting a Trump-like guy.’ But McCarthy did.”
Among the most significant consequences, the former NRCC chief argued, was the failure of the highly anticipated GOP “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections.
The individual close to Mr. McCarthy disputed the former NRCC chairman’s account, contending that the 2021 Young Gun selection process was delayed by the 2020 redistricting process that left dozens of congressional districts in an uncertain status in the following year.
Endorsements of specified Republican officeholders aren’t among the benchmarks.
Two months after his ouster as speaker, Mr. McCarthy announced his resignation from Congress. He will leave his seat at the end of 2023.
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