Kevin McCarthy Quiet After Getting Caught In Lie About Suggesting Trump Resign

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said nothing on Friday after an audio recording exposed him brazenly lying about his own reaction to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

McCarthy on Thursday flatly denied a New York Times report that he planned to tell President Donald Trump to resign after the Capitol riot. Hours after he called the report “totally false and wrong ,” the reporters who had written the story released audio of McCarthy making the statement almost exactly as they’d reported. 

“It would be my recommendation you should resign,” McCarthy told fellow GOP House leaders in a Jan. 10, 2021, call, explaining the advice he planned to give to the then-president as a second impeachment loomed. “That would be my take. I don’t think he would take it, but I don’t know.”

In addition to falsely calling the story wrong, McCarthy on Thursday trashed journalists , claiming “the corporate media is obsessed with doing everything it can to further a liberal agenda.”

A spokesman for McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost on Friday.

The Times reporters on Friday released a separate recording  of McCarthy telling a broader group of House Republicans , the week after the attack, that Trump had agreed with him that he bore “some responsibility” for what happened. That claim, which was reported at the time without the audio , doesn’t gel with Trump’s behavior then or now. In recent months, Trump has gone so far as to describe the riot as a justified protest against a stolen election .

McCarthy, too, has downplayed the riot. But the revelation of his private suggestion that Trump shouldn’t serve the final days of his presidency, which had not been reported before this week, makes his earlier public reversal on the Capitol riot all the more remarkable.

A week after the attack, McCarthy said on the House floor that Trump bore “responsibility” for what happened and should be censured. The following week, he said that Trump had not provoked the riot after all . And before the month was over, McCarthy traveled to Trump’s Florida mansion to pay his respects.

McCarthy’s groveling reflects a strategy to maintain the fullest possible support of the Trump-loving House Republican conference. If Republicans win control of the House in November’s midterm elections, McCarthy can only remain their leader if a majority of Republicans vote for him to be speaker.