According to an audio recording obtained by CNN, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told two police officers who defended the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the mother of a third who died after the riot, that former President Donald Trump had no idea his supporters were carrying out the deadly attack triggered by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
As revealed in testimony to the House Select Committee on January 6, Trump watched television for hours as the rioters engaged in a brutal fight with law enforcement. But McCarthy maintained Trump was unaware of the violence inside the Capitol when he spoke with Trump by phone that afternoon.
McCarthy also appeared to take credit for getting the then-President to make a late-afternoon public statement urging his supporters to “go home.”
“I’m just telling you from my phone call, I don’t know that he did know that,” McCarthy said during the June 2021 meeting about Trump’s knowledge of the fighting, according to audio secretly recorded by then-DC Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone.
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Fanone told the network on Monday morning that he wasn’t surprised by McCarthy’s comments in the meeting, arguing that he “saw how he had deviated from his original statements immediately after January 6 to seize upon the politics of the moment.”
“But I’m glad I recorded it. That’s why I recorded it, was because I didn’t expect Kevin McCarthy to, No. 1, tell the truth; No. 2, recount the conversation accurately; and No. 3, I wanted to show people how indifferent lawmakers are, not just Republican lawmakers, but all lawmakers, to the actual American people that they are representing,” he told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “New Day.”
The former officer also confronted McCarthy about his defense of Trump, telling the Republican leader: “While you were on the phone with him, I was getting the shit kicked out of me!”
“I told McCarthy I felt betrayed by the way some Republicans were twisting a riotous assault on law enforcement officers into a fundraising grift,” Fanone said, according to CNN.
“‘It’s crap,’ I said. ‘It’s disgraceful,’” he added.
Read the full report on CNN.
