A story from The Washington Post released almost simultaneously with (and perhaps overshadowed by) the recent announcement of Robert Mueller’s appointment by the DOJ as Special Counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, bears the arresting headline, House majority leader to colleagues in 2016: ‘I think Putin pays’ Trump.
And the story’s substance more than lives up to this pretty damn shocking headline. As it turns out, the quote ascribed to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is not only accurate, it is corroborated by a witness: policy director to the House Republican Conference Evan McMullin, who admits: “It’s true that Majority Leader McCarthy said that he thought candidate Trump was on the Kremlin’s payroll.”
As you’re about to see, there’s a reason McMullin had to make that admission. But the initial response to questions about McCarthy’s statement was a categorical denial:
When initially asked to comment on the exchange… Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said: “The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.”
This is what the Republican House Majority Leader “asserted”:
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said... Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.
And there’s more… The statement by Majority Leader McCarthy was made behind closed doors on June 15, 2016. McCarthy made the statement “in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders”. And it was made just after both Speaker Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy had talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, “who had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.”
It was made the day after the news broke that Russian government agents had hacked the computer network of the DNC.
And here’s the kicker: THE CONVERSATION WAS RECORDED. It has been “listened to and verified by The Washington Post.”
The conversation’s transcript is available for your perusal here.