Republican strategist Steve Schmidt condemned House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Sunday hours after the California Republican deflected a question about contradictory statements from the White House and President Trump’s legal team about a controversial 2016 Trump Tower meeting between key Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.
“It gives me no pleasure to say this, I’ve known Kevin McCarthy for a long time and I consider him a friend, but he disqualified himself for the speakership of the House,” Schmidt said during an interview on MSNBC. “At the end of the day, if one of the parties wants to make a monkey majority leader, I’m pretty indifferent to it. But the Speaker is a constitutional officer, third in line to the Office of the President of the United States.”
WHOA.
How @GOPLeader “disqualified himself” for Speaker of the House during a “shameful” appearance on the Sunday shows, according to @SteveSchmidtSES pic.twitter.com/4yGvJzTtXy
— Kasie DC (@KasieDC) June 3, 2018
Despite prior denials from White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and President Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow in regards to whether Trump “dictated” a statement issued by Donald Trump Jr. saying the meeting was about adoptions, a letter exchanged between Trump’s legal team and special counsel Robert Mueller and published by the New York Times on Saturday indicates that he did.
But when McCarthy was asked during a CNN interview Sunday morning whether he was bothered by the contractions, he deflected the question. “They can go on with the investigation,” McCarthy said, referring to the Mueller probe. “What I was concerned most about, like most Americans, was there any collusion. There was no collusion.”
Schmidt added Sunday night that McCarthy’s appearance was “disgraceful” and “shameful.”
“What you saw was a partisan there, somebody who would do anything, complete servility to the leader, to Donald Trump, above the American Constitution, above the system of checks and balances, above the rule of law,” he said.
Schmidt, who is Edelman’s Vice Chairman, worked on the campaigns of former President George W. Bush, ex-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
