Commentary by
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy offered a masterclass in regard to how to deal with hostile reporters on Monday when he obliterated one of them from CNN.
The California Republican’s argument was one that CNN and its partisan coverage of the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents is disingenuous.
CNN anchors, contributors and guests routinely feign outrage at Trump by portraying him as playing loose with national security.
But the network also platforms a classified documents leaker in former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and one who abused his power in 2020 in former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
That wasn’t lost on the speaker in the Capitol on Monday when a CNN reporter asked him about Trump’s indictment.
McCarthy said he was concerned the government was being “weaponized” by the Biden administration for political purposes and that he and other Republicans are working to ensure there is not a two-tiered justice system in the country.
“You’re with CNN, right?” McCarthy asked the CNN reporter during an interview in which she interrupted him repeatedly.
After the reporter confirmed her affiliation, the speaker grinned and pointed out that it was only appropriate to speak about the two CNN contributors.
When he invoked the name McCabe, the reporter cut in and made a perilous attempt to redirect the conversation.
She asked the speaker about topics such as defunding the FBI and defending Trump.
McCarthy ignored every word she said and hit her with his own line of questioning. It took him all but one minute to put her on the defensive.
“Are you prepared to defend your network, CNN?” he asked.
After a number of interruptions, McCarthy then took command of the conversation and lit CNN up.
“You can’t put words in my mouth, even though your network hired Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for leaking classified documents,” he said.
McCarthy followed up, “Did you remove him from your network? No, you continue to put him on to give judgment against President Trump.”
In spite of multiple interruptions, McCarthy continued his criticism of the beleaguered network:
“So your network hires Clapper, who literally lied to the American public — one of 51 other individuals that had briefings — and used it politically to tell the American public that a laptop was Russian collusion, even though it had all this other information about the Biden administration.”
He then asked, “Are you prepared to get rid of those people from your network?”
After he received no answer to his question, he laid into CNN for weaponizing information in the same manner Clapper and McCabe weaponized their access to intel.
“My concern as a policymaker is that when you weaponize government and now you’re weaponizing networks, that is wrong,” he said.
He concluded, “I have a real problem that your network actually pays people who [used] classified information and then lied to the American public to try to influence a presidential election, and then you put him on your network to try to give an opinion about a president.”
Had McCarthy been holding a microphone, an appropriate measure would have been to drop it and then walk away.
The corporate media has been up in arms about Trump and his relationship to classified information since the FBI raided his home last summer.
The same people have not been concerned by the fact then-Vice President Joe Biden made off with classified documents — none of which he was authorized to declassify — when he left office in 2017.
Clapper’s signature on a letter that falsely portrayed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation also never bothered anyone at CNN.
Nor did the fact McCabe was fired from the FBI in 2018 for leaking classified information to the media.
The answer to the discrepancies here are obvious: the establishment media mostly exists to protect the Democratic Party and its interests and to target people such as McCarthy — the most powerful Republican in the country.
While the speaker is often maligned by people on both sides of the aisle, he can’t be accused of being dull.
Not one person at CNN has the privilege of speaking about Trump’s classified documents case from any position of moral authority.
McCarthy was savvy enough to know that and to turn what could have become a hit job on him into a referendum on the blatant bias in media.
